Nothing blew me away at the VIFF this year like Tropical Manila did in 2008 and Secret Sunshine did in 2007, but I did see some good films this time around, as always. And as always, there were a ton of films that I wanted to see but just couldn't get around to seeing, either because I was pooped from watching so many films, or from scheduling overlaps. It's fun for two weeks to cram films, but after a while you get burnout. It's gotta be a special thing watching a good film, and not homework, otherwise the magic's gone.

Films I really wanted to see and hope to get a chance to see sometime include Eighteen, a film from South Korea that won the Dragons and Tigers award this year (Bakal Boys got honorable mention), Dirty Paradise (French Guiana film about natives fighting for their land rights), Extraordinary Stories (Argentinan 4-hour drama inspired by Borges), Petropolis (Canadian film about the unfolding tar sands disaster next door in Alberta), The Sound of Insects (weird/cool-sounding Swiss film featuring narration inspired by one of my favorite Japanese authors, Masahiko Shimada), Autumn (Turkish film likened to Chekhov via Nuri Bilge Ceylan), Crude, American Casino, Petition, H2Oil, North, and The Age of Stupid.

Films I'm disappointed weren't shown include the new film by the director of Tropical Manila (maybe it's not done?), the chiptune documentary Reformat the Planet and Priit Parn's new film Life without Gabriella Ferri. (For any of my readers in Rio de Janeiro, Parn's new film will be playing on November 11 at the No Taboo 4th annual Festival of Animation and Sex Education)

Adrift was a gorgeously shot and technically very well directed Vietnamese film that somehow didn't sit well with me despite its technical proficiency. The scenario deals with a gorgeous woman who, just wed to a nice young man she discovers quickly to be quite immature sexually, becomes predictably sexually frustrated and succumbs to the wiles of a sexy male model (I'm guessing he's a male model; he's not in the film). The whole seemed to strive for a kind of literary atmosphere, with its velvety tone of languorous yet understated sensuality and the exploration of the psychology of sexual awakening, but it just rubbed me the wrong way and came across as disturbingly artificial and shallow with its Barbie and Ken protagonists and the wife's eye-rolling 'dilemma'. The elder sister who thrusts her innocent younger sister into the situation with a mixture of detachment, love and nihilistic cruelty, was not surprisingly a writer, and the way the directing strove to paint with this world-weary and sophisticated demeanor felt forced and cliche. I'm kind of biased because as a general thing I find films in which a supposedly 'ordinary person' is played by a gorgeous actress or actor to be hopelessly flawed and unbelievable from the outset (Wong Kar-Wai's films being a notable exception), so my bullshit radar was on whenever the wife or her suitor were on the screen, which was basically the whole film. It felt like porn without nudity - sexually frustrating. Actually, maybe now I understand what the director was trying to do with the film.

At the End of Daybreak was a Malaysian film I hated within the first minute, in which the protagonist boils a rat in a cage to death. I can't respect a director whose poverty of imagination requires him to kill a defenseless animal on-screen to shock the audience. After this delightful opener, the film proceeds to be boring for an hour as the protagonist whines to his mother that he doesn't want to go to jail for the statutory rape of his 15-year-old girlfriend before serving up a completely absurd and laughable climactic twist in which the boy and his friends kill the girl and her friends.

Indepencia from the Philippines was conceptually daring but in the final count just not particularly memorable or interesting. The concept is interesting: It's shot in the style of a 30s film from the Philippines, which is to say in black and white, with the set consisting of painted backdrops and a few potted plants to simulate the jungle setting, and interrupted mid-way by a propaganda newsreel by the occupying Americans. The story tells of a mother and her son who flee into the jungle to escape the fighting that erupted with the United States around 1899 (read the Wiki entry in the Philippine-American War). It depicts their daily life in a makeshift hut, evokes their constant fear of discovery, and hints at the atrocities committed by the Americans, which included deliberately killing children. All of this sounds very interesting on paper, but it's unfortunately tedious watching. The history leading to Philippine independence in 1946 is complex and multi-faceted and it would have been nice to see something that helped understand this little-known chapter in the history of American imperialism.

Home is a great documentary that everyone should see - a comprehensive examination of the problems facing our planet today that is powerful and almost overwhelming but with a poetic rather than dry style. It feels like a personal summation of all those environmental issues that have been hovering in the collective consciousness for the last decade. It consists entirely of shots of various locales on the earth shot from above, presumably mostly in a helicopter, accompanied by free-ranging poetic narration that ticks off the countdown to our collective demise and has to struggle fiercely to end optimistically. For its images alone this is a film of staggering beauty, but combined with the poetic narration it makes for a new type of ecological disaster documentary like none we've seen before. It's deeply informed about the various issues at play but personal in tone, like a video essay. This is one of the films that will probably receive widespread distribution, or at least more widespread than many of the obscure films I've seen at the VIFF. I strive to see the obscure ones and miss out the ones likely to get a later screening like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. But this one I'm glad I saw. I'm glad I didn't miss this sucker-punch of a documentary.

Agrarian Utopia is a really interesting film and one of my favorites from the festival. It's interesting because I thought it was a documentary for the whole running length, and only just discovered that it's actually scripted and uses actors (albeit nonprofessional ones)! One of the things I like about many of the films being made today in Asia is how they see a filmmaker go into a local situation, assess the issues that its people face, and create a drama that in style and in content feels like a documentary exploring those issues, but doing it within the framework of a fictional narrative. Bakal Boys was an excellent example of this approach. So is Agrarian Utopia. The film depicts the daily struggle of two farming families who work the soil of borrowed land in northern Thailand. At the beginning we see them enter the land, and the film ends with the landowner kicking them out because he has been forced to sell the land ("because I'm late on my car payments" he states). In-between we are essentially seeing a documentary on the life of the poor rural Thai farmer, from the planting of the crop to its harvest. We see them capture rats and shoot stray dogs to get protein in their diet, which is painful to see but feels natural and normal in their situation. A contrast with these families who are forced by circumstance to live as farmers is provided by a hippy-like retired teacher who lives alone on a small farm and lives off of his organically farmed vegetables. His choice is intellectual; he lives in the fictional ideal of the agrarian utopia, rejecting the wasteful consumption of consumerism that is in fact at the root of many aspects of the global ecological crisis. The farmers live in the real world, in which the masses of poor are forced to wear their bodies out in indentured servitude in the brutish circumstances of farm life. It's a subtly presented but potent contrast, and visually is a very honest examination of the life of the Thai farmer, which in many ways telescopes to the life of farmers elsewhere. An excellent film that resides at the borderline between fiction and documentary.

Sweetgrass is a film on a similar note - an actual documentary about rural life, this time a raw and unmediated documentation of the livelihood of Montana sheep farmers. The bulk of the film is occupied by the dramatic driving of the sheep to pasture in the Rockies and their eventual return. This is an example of rawest form of documentary. Editing is very spare, there is no narration, characters are not interviewed. The whole film consists of long shots of the farmers and their sheep that by the nature of the material are weighty and dramatic and hold the viewer's attention. It's in a way the truest form of documentary: the shot communicates rather than the cut; the subject rather than the director. The film shows us a rough and ready type of cowboy who seems to come right out of another era before the west was won. In a way, you feel for them in the same way you would for Thai farmers. The journey is no Sunday picnic, and you've got to respect their fortitude for doing such unforgiving work in this day and age. The hardest part of the journey comes at the destination in the mountains, which in their brute majesty wear out sheep dog, horse and owner alike. In one memorable sequence, after the sheep have strayed one too many times, one of the cowboys breaks down in a torrent of shockingly colorful language that seems both typical of the stereotype and yet pathetically human and frail. The mountains and the sheep have him on the verge of physical and mental breakdown. The cinematography is also quite daring in its spareness and the length of the shots. The unforgettable moments of the film are the moments of quiet observation when camera and documentary are forgotten, as when the camera follows an old-timer seated on his horse in the twilight of dusk as it slowly walks up the mountain, the man mumbling and singing to himself quite naturally. You feel as if you've glimpsed the ghost of the eternal cowboy of imagination, happy in the heroic loneliness of the untamed wilds.

Today is Better than Two Tomorrows was a story from Laos about two young boys who are sent by their family to a monastery to become monks for a few years. The film was shot entirely by the director, Anna Rodgers from Ireland, and provides a good look into life in Laos, a place I wasn't very familiar with. The length of time the director spent with the kids before shooting to accustom them to her presence makes for some uncannily candid and unforced shots of everyday life, as they have clearly forgotten they have a filmmaker in their midst. I recall hearing a similar story from the director of a superb Chinese docu-drama from a previous VIFF, Ma Wu Jia, which had flawlessly natural acting from its child cast. Today is in fact a documentary, but it has the pacing of a good drama. The excellent editing keeps things developing at all times while taking plenty of time to display the beauties of the locale and its people and how the days flow by. As we follow the young protagonists on their journey, we're privy to all of their emotions and the complex societal fabric that envelops them, and it makes for emotionally rewarding viewing, unlike some of the other documentaries I've seen, which can be rather dry and distant. One thing that was not explained in the film is exactly why the boys have to go to the monastery, so I asked the director after the screening. It turns out that it's not a case of poor families sending their children to become monks to have one less mouth to feed, which is what I had assumed. Laos, together with Thailand, Burma and Cambodia, practice the Theravada branch of Buddhism, which says that Buddha was just a man, as opposed to the Mahayana sect in most other countries where Buddhism is practiced, which has deified Buddha. The upshot is that, in Laos, as we see in this film, the onus of reducing your burden of karma lies with yourself (whereas in Mahayana Buddhism you just have to pray occasionally to a diety), and hence a large part of the population apparently spends time in their youth at the monastery, later re-integrating with society at large and living a normal life. I happen to just be reading Guy Delisle's Burma Chronicles, which talks a bit about this. Today is Better than Two Tomorrows is a great film that provides a colorful look into a culture most of us probably know little about. It's too bad this film and most of the other good films I've seen probably won't be shown in many places after this. So many good films are made each year, and so few people get to see them.

My big catch from this year's VIFF was perhaps less a single film that the collective work being done by unsung but superb filmmakers with small teams in poor countries documenting real life through various hybrids of drama and documentary - films like Today is Better than Two Tomorrows, Bakal Boys and The Wind and the Water.

Some more thoughts on films I've seen at the VIFF. I'll start with the ones of more relevance to this blog.

I saw the fourth installment in the McDull series, Kung-Fu Kindergarten. I never saw the third one, but I'd seen the first two at the VIFF in prior years. The second had disappointed me, being a rehash of the first in style and tone, and seeming to show the seams of the material, which seems like nothing more than a series of gags in retrospect. I was astounded that the fourth film felt pretty much exactly like the previous entries. It's something of an amazing feat to be able to make so little progress after four films. I assume it's intentional, because the formula seems to work with audiences. The audience at the screening I saw was roaring with laughter at the tiniest little movement of a character. It seems like the film couldn't go wrong. The mere appearance of a cute anthropomorphic animal on the screen was enough to elicit a wave of "awws". I think I laughed honestly at the joke where the guy breaks a toothpick and throws it in his tea to perform an augury, and McDull goes, "Um, I used that to pick my teeth." But the rest as pretty slim pickins. Like the previous films, the style of the film is hand-drawn characters and CGI or paintings for the backgrounds and everything else. The backgrounds were actually quite nice in and of themselves in many spots, but the animation of the characters was just as lifeless and uninteresting as any of the previous films. I think part of what ruined it for me is people roaring with laughter at jokes that to me seemed like they might support at best a knowing smirk. Humanity depressed me in that theater. If I were watching it at home, I think it might have come across as a harmless little witty 70-minute entertainment, and an example of an internationally successful mainland Asian animation franchise, and I would probably have liked it better. I think it's fair to be demanding, though, and to ask: If it's possible for a franchise like this to be successful, where are the other mainland Asian projects trying to do something more ambitious? That's what I'd like to see. I thought the first McDull was ambitious and a laudable film. Making a series of it ruined it for me.

My Dog Tulip by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger is one of the best animated films of the last few years, no hesitation. It certainly renewed my faith in the possibilities of small-scale animated filmmaking after my viewing of the former film. This is indie feature filmmaking done right - a true work of love, handmade throughout without unnecessary polish, extremely creative with limited means, deeply felt, and with intelligent humor that elicits genuine laughter. I've been waiting for this one for years, and it exceeded my expectations, probably because I was not familiar with the source material. The source material, about the experiences of an English writer from the first half of the last century, is a masterpiece of dry English wit that serves up one of the most candid portraits of our relationships with our animal companions that has ever been put to paper (at least, judging by the film). The film largely consists of narrated reminiscences by the author about his experiences with his dog that are brought alive into visuals by the animation, much as was the case with the last film by the Fierlingers that I saw a few years back - A Room Nearby. The animation is very crude, with even buildings being drawn in a couple of askew scribbles, and took some getting used to. But this is animation at its most honest and real. Every movement of a character, every idea for what to portray on the screen and when in relation to the narrative, comes across as believable and funny, as the work of a master artist who isn't worrying about surface prettiness, but rather about creating animation that is truthful at every moment, whether it's in the realistic portrayal of the dog's behavior or the many flights of fancy in which the dog dons a dress and prances about. The humor of this film comes from wry and unflinchingly frank observations about the icky facts of life, whether it be describing the sanitary habits of one's canine, or going into an extremely uncomfortable level of detail about matters of reproduction (I now know more about dog vulvas than I wish I did).

Legendary Russian animator Andrey Krzhanovsky, who will be turning 70 next month, was represented at the festival with his debut live-action film, A Room and a Half, or a Sentimental Journey to the Homeland, released after 6 years of work. The film depicts the life of exiled poet Joseph Brodsky, and feels excessively languid and uninteresting in the sequences depicting his youth, but it works tremendously well in the various animated sequences that litter the film and bring alive the world of Brodsky's imagination and poetry. Together they make for a good balance in depicting a poet's life, and the film serves as a good example of how to use animation to heighten live-action filmmaking. I just wish the film were shorter and more tightly edited.

Trimpin: The Sound of Invention is a documentary about the outsider musician/inventor who goes by the name of Trimpin and currently resides in Seattle. I wish I had known about him when I lived there briefly, as the man has no cell phone, no web site, and there is basically no way to know where his work is being displayed short of contacting him directly. Which is a tremendous shame, because this wonderfully directed and edited documentary brings to us a picture of a true genius who is creating art that comes directly from within his soul. As the documentarist himself noted in the Q&A after the screening (at which a genial Trimpin was also present to kindly explain his take on things), his work comes across as a big up yours to the art establishment. Whether or not his art commands high prices, he will go on creating his extravagant sound sculptures, like a boy so endlessly fascinated by the magic of machinery that he must constantly take things apart to see how they're made, and put them back together in ingenious new configurations that bring dead and decaying technology humorously to life. Although Trimpin's sister was inclined to discount the suggestion that his genius is entirely the product of his upbringing in Germany, with its tradition of musical mechanical contraptions, I can see how Trimpin's playful art seems influenced by the whimsical sensibility of those mechanical novelty toys. This is the kind of art whose delightful ingenuity makes everyone, young or old, happy and puts a smile on people's faces, and I have nothing but respect for him for continuing to do what comes naturally to him, irrespective of whether fame follows or not.

The Hong Kong film Written By was the only film I walked out of this year. I haven't seen a film so excruciatingly artless, manipulative and ham-handed in a good long time. The acting was horrible, the directing was tasteless, and most of all the story was pretentious and ludicrous. It attempts to be sophisticated with its hilariously bad imitation of every Charlie Kaufman cliche ever mimicked by a talentless film school student of a scenario, but it falls flat on its face, as does every attempt at humor and emotion. It's been a long time since I've seen a film that so rubbed me the wrong way.

Toad's Oil by actor-turned-director Koji Yakusho left me with a good feeling inside. Although the film is very wobbly if judged critically, and there are a lot of things you could criticize about it, and I'm not even sure it's a good film, I liked it and I appreciate what Yakusho tried to do with it. I liked his acting to begin with. Despite having the world at his feet, I got the feeling that Yakusho was an honest actor and person. I can't think of a more honest and emotionally raw performance than his performance in Eureka. This film benefits of that same kind of unfeigned, instinctive emotional honesty. It deals with a dark subject, but none of the characters betray any emotion throughout what's going on, which comes across as laudably unmanipulative of the audience as well as an interesting examination of how people deal with tragedy, keeping things bottled inside and putting a happy face on grief.

The Wind and the Water was one of the most deeply satisfying films I saw at the festival this year. The film's production style is innovative, being a collective effort at the opposite end of the idea of auteurism that dominates art movies, and its exploration of its characters is richly nuanced and thought-provoking. Ostensibly the first film to be produced entirely in Panama, it tells the story of a native boy from one of the islands inhabited by the aboriginals who comes to Panama for the first time, and an aboriginal girl raised entirely in Panama who visits the islands for the first time, and how their lives intersect. Structurally very elegant, the film is full of little details about the two characters' lives that makes their experience very believable as well as shedding light on the dynamics of life on both sides of the divide. From the girl's perspective we see the ambition to become something in the new society, to leave behind the old culture tied to outdated norms of social behavior and illogical rules, as well as the racist pressure that looks down on who she is deep down, and would never accept her no matter how hard she tries to become something she's not. In our position we see things naturally from her perspective and feel sorry for the ignorance, darkness and poverty in which the natives enclose themselves, and understand her wariness at the world of the elders. The boy's perspective rooted in the island culture is equally believable. He's shocked at the hollowness and institutionalized interpersonal dishonesty of life in town when he goes there. The film is admirable because it isn't necessarily a naive praising of all that is cultural tradition and rejection of everything that is new and modern; it's an even-handed examination of the complex interplay of both sides. The film was made by a collective, with native youth from all walks of life contributing their own life experiences during pre-production to make the experiences of the two characters true to life in that area. (I found this very reminiscent of how Masaaki Yuasa filled out the back stories of the characters in Mind Game with experiences of his staff) In short, this is a magnificent achievement of a film.

Jermal is an austere film from Indonesia that makes for difficult but rewarding viewing. The story is about a boy whose mother just died who goes off in search of his father, whom he finds on a fishing pier in the middle of the ocean. The father had fled society years ago on a murder charge, and now lives a beastly and mute life as a brutal overseer of his fishing operation's child labor. The entire film takes place on the jermal, and it's testament to the quality of the directing that the film holds up during its full length and doesn't become boring or tiresome. It is, however, difficult to endure the banal violence of the torments to which the boy is subjected throughout the first half by the dozen other boys on the jermal, not to mention his own father. As he bonds with the boys and eventually begins to get close to his father in the second half, the film takes on a more straightforward drama trajectory that is a little easier to stomach and even has a moving emotional impact. In retrospect, though, I'm very skeptical about the concept of the film at a basic level. The father's rejection and meanness towards his son seems believable thematically as a psychological corollary to the very obvious physical metaphor of the jermal as a cocoon in which the father shuts himself off from the world - accepting his son breaks down the mental wall he'd built up, and leads to his rehabilitation with society, even if it means heading back to land to face jail time. The transition from brute beast to loving father is just a little much to accept.

I'm very drawn to the ferment occurring in Chinese cinema these days. Some of the best films and the worst films I've seen from Asia lately have been from China, but even in the case of the bad films there's always at least some kind of visceral thrill at what they tried to do and failed. There's real experimentation going on with young filmmakers over there. Kun 1: Action is unfortunately one of the prime examples of the bad side. I find it hard to criticize it, because it's essentially film student wankery, and it's kind of redundant to criticize film students for making pretentious films in homage to Jean-Luc Godard as if they were the first to discover him. That's just what they do. I just can't fathom why it was included in this festival.

Cow is the diametric opposite of the latter - a big artificial wonderful studio extravaganza with superb acting from a huge cast of talented actors, magnificent cinematography, spot-on directing and a satisfying and rich story and characters. This is a shining example of the sort of intelligent films they're making in China aimed at wide audiences. It's not an art film - it's too riotously entertaining and exciting for that - but it's very artistic in both theme and execution. Set in the 1930s in Shandong province in the midst of an attack by the Japanese army on a small Chinese village, the film is unflinching in its portrayal of the brutality of the army, but admirably makes a point to depict the naive young soldiers of the Japanese army as being coerced, like the Japanese people, into fighting a war at the behest of a brutal imperialist government. Probably the most striking thing about the film is its cinematography. It's like they shot the film, and then put it all through Photoshop with the contrast set to 100. Every single solitary object on the screen looks so sharp it'll slice off your finger if you touch it. It's quite beautiful in its elegiac sepia mood, especially in evoking the bomb-blasted colorless deadness of the countryside, but I thought maybe it was a little overdone. Most of all, though, the interaction between the main actor and the cow is quite extraordinary. They manage to create a real feeling of there being a relationship between the two, and to make it seem as if the cow had human feelings and reacted like a human to what was going on around it. It's very artificial, but also very entertaining, and it's admirable in that it makes audiences invest so much emotionally in a cow, something I doubt has ever been done before, or at least to this extent.

Nomad's Land is a simple video travelogue by a Swiss guy retracing the footsteps of a Swiss writer who had taken a trip across the middle east and central Asia by motorcar several decades ago and written an evocative account of his journeys. At first I found the narrator an insufferable prig who could do nothing but talk about his own angsty emotions like an inward-turned adolescent while he's traveling through eastern Europe and the near east, without making a single comment that was enlightening or informative about the culture of the lands through which he travelled. While this criticism remained to an extent thereafter, the sheer beauty of the people and landscapes he photographed once he entered the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan inhabited by nomads of old who lived a life apart from the dominant mulsim culture won me over and made the rest of the journey mesmerising and unforgettable. The hale beauty of the people, with their colorful clothing and ornaments and uncovered heads and open and inviting smiles, serves as a shocking contrast with the cultural and religious closedmindedness and fanaticism that encroaches upon them. It comes across as a miracle that they should be able to continue to exist in such an environment without having been annihilated by the monolith of monoculturalism and religious extremism. It was with a feeling of awe and deep reverence and that I observed the unfolding of their traditional winter solstice ritual, in which they must go sacrifice a goat up on the mountain lest the gods be angered and spring be forever withheld. After continuing eastward, the narrator finds himself in dire straits on a number of occasions, and it was more embarrassing than anything and you felt like the narrator was getting what he deserved for dealing the people of these regions the insult of looking at them through the rose-colored glasses of western pastoral idealization. For the imagery and the tone of the latter half of the film alone, though, with its continuously changing patchwork of central Asian cultural richness, it's worth the price of admission. It's an exciting travelogue that will make you feel like dropping everything and striking out on the journey of a lifetime, possibly never to return.

I'm set to break my own record this year for films viewed at the VIFF - day seven and I've seen 15 so far. Such are the fruits of anomie.

Apart from finding myself more annoyed than usual at the various irritating theatregoer archetypes - the guy sitting next to you who does a little 'heh' for some cosmically unfathomable reason every thirty seconds, the dozens of people laughing hysterically at shit that ain't even meant to be funny, and ain't - I find a demographics issue really bothers me. You go to an Iranian film, it's largely Iranians in the audience. French film, French people. Korean film, Koreans. It's common sense. Obviously people want to go see new films from their homeland when they're alone across the ocean and homesick. But it's an international film festival. It's about celebrating and experiencing other cultures and directing styles by seeing films from lots of countries that you didn't even know were making films. So far I've seen films from Chile, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Tibet and South Africa. I'm excited about seeing the first ever film from Panama. It bothers me that in spite of the bounty of cultural richness being offered to our great city at this festival, and in spite of the illusion of cultural diversity in attendance, it feels like the same type of person who'd never go see a film with subtitles. Of course It's a sloppy generalization with I'm sure plenty of exceptions, since I didn't interview every audience member or anything, but it's something I noticed and wondered about anyway.

As for the films, maybe I'm becoming a grumpy old man, but I'm mostly disappointed so far. Mostly just so-so films and a few out-and-out bad films. Nothing mind-blowing. Keeping my fingers crossed something will excite this year.

One of the recurring problems I found with the films was that they were too long. I've never liked it before when people say a film should have cut off thirty minutes or whatever, but that's exactly what I found myself feeling at the festival for several films. I find that I'm more critical about wanting a film to know what it's trying to do, do it, and get out. It almost seems like filmmakers feel constrained to fill up the two-hour time slot even if they don't have enough material to do so and make it work. Time after time I would be sitting there saying to myself, "Great film! Hope it ends soon." And then thirty minutes later it's still going on, and I'm starting to dislike the film as a result. It's admirable when a film can pull off a 2+ hour length, but I think it's even more admirable when a film can have the restraint to pull in at under 90 minutes. I'm beginning to realize that most films can't justify their playtime.

Sea Point Days, a documentary about the process of re-integration in a seaside neighborhood in South Africa, was probably my favorite film so far - a perfectly edited and paced documentary that interweaves various threads to suggest connections and contrasts and unexpected interpretations, and does it all almost purely through the visuals, rather than relying on narration to establish meaning. This is filmmaking at its purest and most moving. The characters are all interesting and offer valid insights, and the film's central metaphor of the public pool on the promenade as a place of healing - national, cultural, physical - is convincing and moving. It's remarkable the degree to which the filmmaker makes us think about the various issues at play in the area at this moment in time exclusively by judicious presentation of simple, unostentatious shots of life on the street. The music was also in excellent taste, subtle and not manipulative. So it's disappointing that even this great film seems to suffer from excessive length. The film is broken up into 5 parts, and the film felt like it said most of what it needed to say in the first three acts.

I'm very interested in seeing documentaries on the subject of globalization and neo-liberalism, so Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy seemed poised to be the perfect film for me. But it's good contrast with Sea Point Days in many ways. Just because it's a documentary doesn't mean all films are made alike. This film was the diametric opposite of Sea Point Days - a series of interviews stringed together with no cuts. Period. No editing, no fanfare. The figures interviewed were luminaries who provided great insights into the subject at hand, but the film was way too long (I started falling asleep two and a half hours into the film), and there was no unity or organization to the material, so the barrage of talking heads just left you with a jumble of unorganized strands. Rather than illuminating the subject, I found myself more confused than ever. The approach has its merit, but the audiovisual element contributes absolutely nothing to this film, and hence makes the film somewhat superfluous. The interviews might as well simply have been transcribed and published online.

Around the World With Joseph Stiglitz: Perlis and Promises of Globalization similarly promised to be informative, but disappointed. The famed economist is filmed wandering through the abandoned buildings of his hometown whilst discussing the negative impact of globalization on various parts of the world. This is again a case of a film about a fascinating subject that has at its center a great figure who knows his stuff, but it's a slipshod film. The images of Joseph wandering around entire neighborhoods left abandoned are quite powerful - shocking images enough when they're from some third-world country, even moreso coming from the world's economic powerhouse - but no mention whatsoever is made of what happened in his hometown. It feels underexplained. More importantly, the film is weakly argued and fails to achieve a strong, cohesive thread. Instead, we drift vaguely between subjects and shots of Joseph Stiglitz standing in ruins. Informative, but feels like it could have been better.

Moon at the Bottom of the Well was my second favorite film so far. A delicate, natural and convincing drama about a couple in Vietnam that presents a sensitive and nuanced metaphor for the evolution of social mores regarding love and relationships in that country over the last few decades (as I interpret it), it might have been my favorite but again was plagued by that same nagging specter - not ending when it should have. I've seen any number of films that take that slow, quiet approach to the directing that seems to dominate filmmaking in many parts of Eurasia these days - long shots, minimal dialogue and little or no camera movement - but this is one of the better executed that I've seen. Often that styles comes across as a tired stylistic ploy, but here the directing didn't feel meandering or pointless. It didn't feel like stylistic affect. The film meanders lovingly over the details of the couple's every day life. It feels directionless, but very subtly the directing is building up a portrait of the wife's decadent doting of her husband that leads her to tragedy. What felt like a spot-on drama in the first three quarters, unfortunately, abruptly shifted to melodrama following the husband's departure. Everything subsequent to that, I felt, cheapened a wonderful film. It would have been far better off leaving things up in the air at that point and cutting the last thirty minutes. Sometimes mystery is better.

Be Calm and Count to Ten, though from a very different country - Iran - also partakes of something of the same visual/directing ethos of minimal dialogue and minimal narrative of Moon at the Bottom of the Well. Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is kind of the figure at the origin of this style, or at least is its unsurpassed master (Taste of Cherry and Close-up among his crowning achievements). He clearly influenced many filmmakers the world over, and the methods his films suggested to filmmakers for how to enter a real situation and film it and create fiction out of something real, mixing documentary and drama, have resulted in some gems from far-flung corners of the globe, and freed filmmakers from the chains of conventional narrative forms. At the same time, it's resulted in some just plain tedious filmmaking. Be Calm and Count to Ten is a fairly good film that injects a welcome vein of lightheartedness and absurd humor into a style that feels detached and documentary in spirit. The boy actor at the center of the film is convincing and vivacious in his role, and a good rhythm drives the film between speedy and exciting scenes of smuggling activities and quiet scenes of the protagonists wandering around the barren environs - no feeling of excessive length here. In contrast with Moon at the Bottom of the Well, the satisfyingly inconclusive conclusion leaves it up in the air what has happened to the protagonist.

Bakal Boys from the Philippines also features a cast of amateur boys at its center. The film was shot entirely in one of the country's big slums, and the director auditioned 100 local boys for the actors of the film, finally choosing a dozen or so. In the film, the boys are metal divers who imitate their fathers in diving to the bottom of the bay to bring up scraps of metal to sell to buy food to eat. The film is a half-documentary, half-drama fictional depiction of these boys' lives. This is exactly how they live, so you are in essence seeing real life, but invested with the meaning of a narrative about the search for one of the boys who goes missing on one of the gang's diving trips. The boy at the center of the film, young Meljun Ginto, is nothing less than a dynamo of energy and charisma, a true born star, and he steals every scene he's in. The scenes of interaction are all natural and candid and splendidly achieved, considering all the difficulties the director must have encountered wrangling a whole herd distractable boys to act out their lines on camera. Shooting apparently only took three days, if I recall correctly, which was shocking to hear. Even more shocking is to hear that this is Ralston G. Jover's directing debut. The VIFF hosts a 'Dragons and Tigers' competition each year for directors who have yet to receive widespread recognition. I've seen three or four of the others in competition, and Bakal Boys annihilates the competition. It also felt like it might have used a bit of tightening near the conclusion, but it's a minor quibble. This is a splendid achievement - at times devastatingly sad, but ultimately uplifting and deeply honest.

The Search, apparently only the second film ever to be shot entirely in Tibet that actually went through the proper authorization and censorship channels and will consequently be receiving legitimate distribution inside of the PRC, was the most obviously Kiarostami-influenced film of the lot, with its setup about filmmakers wandering around the countryside in a car (Through the Olive Trees), and long shots of conversation in a car and of the car driving across the countryside (Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us). Filmmakers are driving across the countryside to find a renowned singer of traditional Tibetan opera/theater to perform in a play that they wish to film. The bulk of the film consists of the sponsor, in the car, over the length of the drive, telling a story about his first love, interspersed with auditions of villagers in various places. After the thirtieth minute of his story, it became a bit tedious. But the scenery was gorgeous, the situations were marvelously staged, the persons photographed (not 'actors') were all wonderfully ingenuous and real. It's an excellent example of filmmaking at the crossroads of narrative and documentary. The way various vectors of motivation intertwined in the film was satisfying - the filmmakers trying to make a film, and the girl singer they are forced to drive to meet her ex boyfriend (the singer), who we at first believe to be trying to get back together with him, but we find out at the end is made of tougher stuff than that. The scenes of various people they encounter along the way singing the traditional Tibetan opera were beautiful. There's no narrative other than this, yet there's a rich sense of purpose throughout. It's a quietly beautiful film that deliberately avoids emotionalism and drama yet manages to resonate. One particularly memorable scene in the film shows some young acolytes at a temple shyly fidgeting and zooming through a recitation of the sutras they've memorized. Boys will be boys, no matter the cultural context. The simple act of going around and connecting with people through art shows our common ground and breaks down barriers in a way that more direct political confrontation can't.

I'll stop here and continue with the rest later.

Persepolis is the best film I've seen in animation in a while. I missed the chance to have a look at District and Renaissance last year and the year before at the VIFF, so I don't know how they compare, but this year I caught the festival's only full-length animated feature, after some dithering. I'm thankful I did. It's a splendid film, one that doesn't just speak to children/animation fans, but to audiences of all stripes with a deeply heartfelt and human story of life in the real world. Like McDull, it's an eminently local film, without being self-servingly so. It's a film that feels of today's age like few other animated films I've seen, for one because it is steeped in actual history as experienced by a discrete individual, but moreso because it is magnificently eloquent on the emotional and physical turbulence of the experience of growing up in such an environment. If an animated film is made for adults, there seems to be a conception that it has to pander to the lower instincts of adult viewers. It's refreshing to see a film that is adult in a real sense of the term, in that it speaks in a language that is nuanced and subtle, informed and literate without being pretentious or snobbish.

From an animation standpoint I found the spare visuals very refreshing and appealing. Watching the film, I was appalled by how anime in contrast seems utterly devoid of sincere expression of the sort I felt in every simple composition in each shot of this film. They weren't simply running frantically in a hamster wheel to catch up with a card-deck of pre-chewed expressive symbols and predictable dramatic cliches. They had a very interesting story to tell that created its own arc, and a very unusual but appealing and original design ethos to do so with that was throughout visually compelling and helped the story speak what it needed to say, without being bogged down in pointless photorealism or allowing things to get distracted by stylistic handstands. On a technical note, perhaps it was just my imagination, but I wondered why the characters seemed to suddenly move with much more richness and nuance during the scenes in which they where in silhouette.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I'll have seen 18 films by the time this year's festival winds down tomorrow. Impressively, most of them were good. I was surprised to find myself disliking the ones I was expecting to like, and vice-versa. The human creature craves change. I walked out of The Man From London, partly because I was feeling irritated and impatient that morning for reasons that had nothing to do with the film, and partly because the film's excruciatingly slow pace and long shots were not enough to make the film interesting, even purely on a visual plane, in the way that films by Tarkovsky or Kiarostami or Hou Hsiao-Hsien are. They felt merely pedantic and trying. I was surprised to find myself wanting to walk out on the big romantic historical set-piece Lust, Caution after merely the first five minutes, considering how much I enjoy watching Tony Leung, but the film's artifice and predictability were unbearable, and nothing in the subsequent two and a half hours changed that initial impression.

Taiwan's Island Etude easily left the best aftertaste and was the most inspiring and invigorating, a feel-good movie in the good sense, with a deft, warm undercurrent of hope and humor throughout and lots of fun and believable characters. The Chinese Ma Wu Jia was stunning for a first feature. It's a simple story of life in the countryside for a widowed mother and her two boys, but the director explained after the screening that the extraordinary realism and naturalness of the on-screen interaction was the result of having had everyone live together first for a few months prior to beginning shooting, with many of the scenes having been improvised. It was one of the most immediate of the films I saw, and gets my vote for the best debut. Another debut from China was Mid-Afternoon Barks, which was more novel in structure and refreshingly elliptical and deliberate in its refusal to make sense, consisting as it does of a mere assemblage of character comings and goings tied by the ephemeral thread of mysterious metaphorical white poles going up everywhere for some unknown reason, with any notion of story left entirely up to the viewer to piece together. Two people were snoring throughout the film. Loudly. As a bravado piece of daring by a new face it was admirable, but I wasn't convinced that it was a compelling piece of cinema. Yet I would rather see a film like this made by someone who really wants to create something new than lifeless pulp like Lust, Caution.

China was the most prolific country apart from Canada at the festival. Useless was one of the most structurally and conceptually stimulating and daring, with its tripartite meditation on the role of garments in society and the workers who create the garments in a globalized age. It inventively appropriated documentary strategies to approach a pre-meditated concept and a not-quite-there narrative, in the best tradition of Kiarostami. Going Home was a warm and humorous story with a very sad heart, and was thoroughly delightful and uplifting viewing. A road movie like Island Etude, but telling of a character on a very different kind of journey, the one that comes at the end of life. God Man Dog from Taiwan was a very different sort of story, one where various distinct characters' lives eventually intersect in the end. Even without any grandiose goings on or grand epiphanies it was a joy to watch and surprisingly did not feel artificial or old hat despite the familiar scenario.

Iran's Those Three told the story of deserters in the midst of the Iranian winter, and was, not surprisingly, by far the most aesthetically severe and uncompromising of any of the films I saw. The conclusion has a stoic inevitability to it, and the cinematography was unadorned in typical Iranian fashion yet somehow almost painfully gripping. A film in color yet in black and white. Dead Time was one of the most fascinating films I saw at the festival for its meaningful blending and updating of conventional film genres like mystery, film noir, horror and political thriller, telling a noirish convoluted story of supernatural murder that eventually climaxes in a scene that is as surprising for its political overtones as for its comic-book tone and imagery. Hong Kong's The Mad Detective was another entertaining genre-bender with an interesting though somewhat forced concept and execution, but seemed to paddle in more conventional and shallower waters without quite seeming to use the interesting concept to its full potential, while conversely sometimes striving too hard for effect.

The Mongolian Khadak was a story in microcosm of the wholesale destruction of the traditional lifestyle of sheep-herders on the steppes that had as an asset real emotional conviction, but whose message became fogged in a haze of poetic images at the end that diluted that message. The French/Belgian- produced, African-set Sounds of Sand was a depressing story of a family of goatherds forced into a doomed exile in a search for the ever scarcer resource of water. It seemed diminished for being a message film whose goals were clear from the outset, but those goals are irrefutable, and the film was a potent wake-up call as a painful reminder of the sort of unbearable truths unfolding all around us as we obliviously fly above people like this in our silver cannisters. That image from the film was the simplest and most powerful - a lone jet passing in the sky as a girl and her father die of hunger in the desert.

Faro: Goddess of the Waters was a slightly more benign and human exploration of the impact of water on the lives of people in Africa, pitting a western-educated engineer against uneducated villagers as he tries to get a dam constructed. The film artfully interweaves the story of the man's struggle to unearth the identity of his father, all the while fighting the villagers' irrational beliefs and discrimination, against a backdrop of the story of progress vs. traditional beliefs in Africa. Finally, in a sharp left turn, Echoes of Home, the only pure documentary I saw this time around, was a fascinating and delightful exploration of the phenomenon of yodeling in the Swiss Alps, which, this documentary reveals, runs the gamut from traditional Heidi-yelping to experimental sounds by younger proponents of the form that are of tremendous beauty and musical quality. There were too many fiction features from Asia this year that I had to see, so I was unable to see more documentaries - which is a shame, because there were other very interesting documentaries at the festival that I would have liked to see, like Dust, an epic about the ubiquitous invisible substance and its role in our lives, Losers and Winners, about the workers in the globalized world, Kabul Transit, Manda Bala, Nanking, Forbidden Lies...

Actually, I was forgetting what is probably my favorite film from the festival, the Korean film Secret Sunshine. It features a bravado performance of searing emotional intensity by the lead female actor, and is one of the most incisive psychological portraits I've ever seen committed to film. The film conscientiously and patiently examines the process by which emotional damage can lead people to seek refuge in organized religion, without intellectualizing the issue or taking a taunting stance on the subject, and the film benefits immensely for the way in which it allows the emotional journey of the heroine to unfold naturally and honestly and thereby lucidly illustrate the process, in all its twists and turns, without anyone on the other side of the fourth wall weighing in on the issue. The film is admirably poker-faced, totally intent on honestly showing things from the protagonist's perspective, so much so that it can have you fooled for a while. This is a film I think Luis Bunuel would have liked. Surprising and intriguing, then, to find that the director just came from a stint as Korea's Minister of Culture. He was apparently a filmmaker before taking on the post, so his incredible directing skills on display in this film are less of a surprise, but knowing this makes me curious to look at the film through the lens of what influence his experience in that post might have exerted on the film, how the film might represent his diagnosis of Korean society. Not one minute of the film's more than two-and-a-half-hour length grew tiresome for an instant, and, ending the experience on a perfect note, the film ended just on the shot I was hoping it would. It was a rich viewing experience that reminds me that what I most want to see is insight into the human mind - in filmmaking, but animation can also do that. The vitality and variety of many of the films I saw here is inspiring.

Wandering around Chinatown yesterday I wandered into a DVD shop where I picked up a DVD of a film I'd never heard of but that looked up my alley, Postmen in the Mountains. Watching it it felt like it was from the early 80s, but in fact it's a film from 1999. Its washed out color palette is a delight, and the film is a delight, one of the most moving I've seen in a while. The sort of film where nothing much happens but each moment is filled with meaning and tremendously moving. My eyes were burning the whole time. It brought back memories of crossing the Pyrenees with my dad a few years ago, which certainly helped make it more resonant to me.

One-track-minded person that I am, I couldn't help but think that this is the sort of thing I've been wanting to see done properly in animation. The film does what films rarely manage to do, convey the sensation of another human being beside you. Normally film is a medium where the medium is foregrounded and human warmth is a distant dream, but this film did what few films I've seen do - evoke that strange tingling sensation of uncertainty and tentativeness when there's someone there beside you. What it is to be alive, basically. Animation is a tool that can evoke reality by careful selection and emphasis, and for some reason I felt that would have been a good way to achieve what they did here. Hara strikes me as the closest to this I've seen in animation. Been feeling particularly sick of anime these days and wanting to see a film that goes back to something more fundamental like this.

I'm excited that I'll be able to see Tokyo Story on the big screen for the first time in over a decade in the next few days.

I saw Ratatouille and thought it was perhaps the best CGI film I've seen. I'll admit no previous CGI films did much for me, but this was a very solid and most of all tremendously entertaining and engaging film, even aside from the technical aspects, which are obviously without par in the genre. For the first time ever for me there were even moments of movement that I enjoyed as movement. I particularly liked the bit where Remy is about to run out of the restaurant at the beginning but gets lured back to fix the soup. For some reason a lot of the drama flow and humor felt slightly Miyazaki-influenced. Was shocked to realize that one of my favorite actors, Ian Holm, voiced Skinner, but I didn't even realize it.

I was visiting China for the last two weeks, and had the chance to drop into some video stores over there. I picked up a DVD of La Prophetie Des Grenouilles for the equivalent of $1. I'd seen the tail end of the movie on TV late one night in Quebec a while back and wanted to see the whole thing. Seems to be a very good film. More interestingly, I also found a few bits of local animated fare that I'd never heard of and would probably never have been able to find outside of the country - things like Xiao Heshang (Little Priest?), a TV series from 2006 that seems rather lackluster; Grandma and her Ghosts, a 2000 movie from Taiwan that seems to have a passable script but rudimentary animation; and a movie version of Tsai Chih Chung's comic of Laozi's teachings. I remember reading a translation of his comic version of Zhuangzi a long time ago. There were also a number of other films adapted from his other classics-based comics.

I also picked up a DVD of Kon Ichikawa's Taketori Monogatari (1987), which is a retelling of the folktale about a baby girl who is found in a bamboo grove by an old farmer couple only to turn out to be a girl from the moon. The main innovation of the film is that the old folktale is re-read as an ET story, the girl really being from space. Other than that the film seems an ordinary set piece from Heian Japan. Kon Ichikawa has been a director about whom I've been interested in seeing more films for years. His films seem to straddle every conceivable genre, often at the same time. I saw the handful of his films that were available in the west many years ago, but unfortunately that's merely the tip of the iceberg, as he actually made more than 80 films, the latest being last year's remake of Inugami no Ichizoku. Not all of the films are reportedly that great, so perhaps that's reason we haven't seen more. He started working in films at age 18 in 1933 - quite a career.

What really interested me about Ichikawa, though, was the fact that he started out as an animator. I'd forgotten about this fact until watching Taketori Monogatari, which brought it back. Watching the film I couldn't help but think it felt very animation-like. The framing, the lighting, the pacing all seemed to be like something that would come from the mind of an animator. Or in other words, it felt like you could very well have taken each frame of the film and animated it and it would have worked equally well, if not better. Only after I finished watching the film and thought about this did I remember about his past as an animator. It took some digging to re-discover the name of the only one of his animated films I remember having read about - Shinsetsu Kachikachi Yama, which is often translated as The Hare Gets Revenge Over the Raccoon. It dates from 1936, so it's one of the earliest things in his filmography.

I haven't run across this anywhere on the web, but apparently Kon Ichikawa's real name is Yoshikazu Ichikawa. He started using the pen name only after he began working in live-action. So the animated films were made by Yoshikazu Ichikawa. It seems Ichikawa saw some Disney animation on the big screen and was so enamored with what he saw - because it combined all of the arts that interested him - that he immediately decided to become an animator. In 1933, at age 18, he joined the recently formed animation branch of movie studio JO Talkie. There were only 6 or 7 other employees at the studio, and after about two or three years the studio gradually lost interest in animation, so that by the end, Ichikawa, the only one still interested in animation, was the only one there to do all of the tasks.

The 8-minute Shinsetu Kachikachi Yama is presumably one of the last of their films, and Ichikawa is credited with having done almost everything on the film, including script, animation, photography and editing. Ichikawa's love of Disney apparently comes through in the film, which is closely modeled after the Silly Symphonies in terms of structure, motion and designs. The film even features a Mickey lookalike. In 1978 Ichikawa directed a live-action adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's Firebird, which features some animation by Tezuka himself, and he apparently often stated that animated thinking tinged all of his storyboards for his films. That definitely comes through in Taketori Monogatari. I'd like to have the chance to see more of his less well-known films like this to see more of his fascinating animation-tinged directing. I've long been particularly curious to see Topo Gigio and the Missile War from 1967, which as far as I've been able to figure out is some kind of combination of puppetry and live action. One of Ichikawa's earliest films, Musume Dojoji (1946) - incidentally the one he considers his best - was also a puppet film. Not stop-motion puppetry, but actual puppets.

I guess one of the things that strikes me as seeming very animation-like about his thinking as a director is that he conceives of scenes that you just can't do in live-action, so often there are miniatures like the boat in a storm scene in this film, and lots of SFX. The framing and positioning of the characters on the screen also seems very artificial and theatrical rather than naturalistic. The lighting is another thing. The colors on the screen are emphasized and exaggerated, in a way that reminds me of the way colors were used in Mind Game. He controls all of the parameters of the screen in a way it seems only an animator would feel the need to. I can't help but wonder what might have happened if Ichikawa had continued working in animation instead of moving to live-action.

With only a week remaining, among the best films I've seen so far at the Vancouver International Film Festival was the new film by Hirokazu Kore-eda: Hana (Hana yori mo nao). I knew it would be good, but it was totally different from what I was expecting. Koreeda was one of my favorites of that wave of minimalist filmmaking that swept Japan in the late 90s, of which his brooding Maboroshi no Hikari seemed to be the harbinger, but here he sets out to show that minimalist mood isn't all there is to his palette with a rollicking period comedy that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and trenchantly revisionist. If anything, it felt like I was watching a soft-edged Shohei Imamura. I never imagined he had it in him, and was expecting something closer to 2004's Nobody Knows. The humor was always dead on, as if it had been written by someone who'd been writing comedy films professionally for all his life, so I assumed panderingly that there was no way he could have written the film, and he was finally resorting to falling back directing other people's films, but I was impressed to see that it was written, directed and produced by himself. A real genius. The film is a long-needed re-interpretation of the cliched story of the "47 loyal retainers", recasting it into what it really was - a gruesome, anachronistic fiasco that gave the lie to the whole notion of bushido and signalled the end of a barbaric era.

The other hilight so far was the Taiwanese Cheng Yu-Chieh's amazingly accomplished debut feature Do Over. It was kind of like Magnolia, but without the schmaltz. Cinematography, sound design and directing were sophisticated and flawless. The very ambitious interlocking structure seemed to be teetering on the brink of spinning out of control at every moment, but he managed to retain control over every moment, creating a thrilling, stimulating, ever-evolving interlocking web of significance. A tremendous debut. The Moroccan Heaven's Doors was a similarly ambitious debut by a young brother directing team weaving together various narratives, but here there was less a feeling of control, with shaky acting, excessive length and inflection a bit too Hollywood. Climates by Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan also felt like a step down from his Distant, which I had greatly appreciated while noting a twinge of stylstic stretching thin. Here it felt like we were seeing more of the bad parts of of Distant, with long takes that didn't seem to hold up and a feeling of dreariness for dreariness's sake. There were a few years when Abbas Kiarostami's influence seemed to have injected a fresh vein of simplicity into filmmaking around the world, resulting in some excellent, sparely styled films in the early 2000s, but it's starting to feel like it's time to be moving on. Like Kanada's animation and the league of imitators, only the master can do it right. The Indonesian Love for Share was an unexpectedly delightful comedy of polygamist manners. Oku Shutaro's indie Cain's Children may have read well in the script, but it was a disappointment on the screen. In another disappointment, there were no guest appearances at the Alternative Anime screening, but as if by way of compensation, our patience was rewarded by a Q&A with the one redeeming feature of Cain's Children - its lead actor, Kazushi Watanabe - Visitor Q in the flesh! He's a great actor, and it was painful to see him saddled with the mediocre cast of this indie film. I hope he has a chance to act in some better films in the coming days.

This year's Alternative Anime felt very different from the last. Probably this was largely because most of the films this time around came from a different country. What was perhaps most interesting was to see the contrast in tendencies between student animation in Japan and Korea - if you can even identify a 'tendency'. Japanese student films seems generally more esoteric and inward-turned and abstract, Korean (from what I've seen here) more narrative-focused and linear and emotive. Because most of the films were student films, there was a sort of youthful 'haze' there, a feeling of still groping to figure out how to express oneself. The films had the freshness and lack of stale polish that I appreciate in student films, but also the lack of direction and purpose that can either be an asset or a liability in student films, and I can't say that many of them grabbed me except for possibly Act 1, Chapter 2, a bizarre retelling of the creation that worked on some visceral level but felt like it strove too much for shock effect. Notably, the music was excellent throughout. The schools must have been involved in the music somehow. One film stood apart from the rest in a league of its own - Space Paradise by Lee Myung-Ha. I actually dismissed the film while watching it because I thought it was not fair to compare the creation of students to the creation of a professional animation studio. I was shocked on seeing the credits to realize Lee had animated the entire film himself. I don't know if he's still a student or not, but what a difference genius makes! His film simply blew away everything else in the selection. I can definitely see Lee Myung-Ha going places. Lee's film was perfectly balanced entertainment, showing a level of technical refinement and narrative assuredness that I thought only a team of professionals could have achieved. A question that remains with me is how on earth he animated the film. Did he map the movement of the robot from CG? If he did, the results are wonderful and don't feel like CG; if he didn't, he's an amazing prodigy of an animator.

The entries from Japan were in the minority this time around, but had a better batting average. The experimental CG short Suzie No-Name was way, way too bizarre for its own good, but otherwise Yoshinao Sato's Desktop took a simple enough idea - how would you animate the desktop? - and did a convincing job of discovering a method of animation that stays true to the nature of the material, unleashing the hidden potential movement in the familiar play of windows splayed across all of our desktops by moving them around in an ingenious and mesmerizing dance of resizing, scrolling, and zooming. The third and last of the Japanese entries and of the selection was the one that struck me at the deepest level, Mitsuo Toyama's Trot. Toyama is a name I discovered on Digital Stadium, a peculiar and intriguing figure who is possibly even more interesting as a person than the animation he creates, which is saying a lot. I mentioned that the lack of polish of student films can be either an asset or a liability, and Toyama is one of the rare cases where it is an asset. In fact, it seems to be intrinsically tied to what makes his films great - that evanescent, delicate awkwardness of youth that will disappear with time. Toyama seems to be a true visionary - a poet whose poem is his life. I don't know what he is doing with his life now, but when his first film hit Digital Stadium in 2005 - You and I, and the Wind - he was working in a factory assembling cell phones by night and reading poetry to his own musical accompaniment like a Tokyo troubadour in city parks by day. His animation is an extension of that spirit of living in the now, steeped in a language and a mood entirely his own - the language of the cold wind striking your face on a walk in the dark of the night. Whereas most animation is as if squeezed out because the creators don't have anything to say, Toyama isn't squeezing. He's channelling. His films feel like a stethoscope to the soul. Watching his films you find yourself floating along on his mystical wavelength without even needing to understand what is going on. There are different ways an animated film can 'work', and his work fantastically well on the level of mood. I see now that Toyama came back to Digital Stadium with another film just last month - Celestial Observations.

As I was driving back home through the rain from seeing Lee Sung-Gang's film today, my iPod happened upon some music by Isang Yun, which seemed appropriate. Not just because they're both among the best Korean artists I'm familiar with, but because there seems to be a tangible spiritual kinship there, in their sensual romanticism that isn't Hollywood but uncompromisingly personal and modern in its idiom.

Lee's first live-action feature falls perfectly in line with his past work. Up until directing his animated feature debut, his early films were inward-turned explorations of individual anomie, of people with "something missing" looking for that other half - or losing it, as the case may be, as in one of his most recent and most accomplished early shorts, his 1998 Ashes in the Thicket. The latter now seems to directly forebode his feature directing debut, as the two have numerous obvious similarities - the loving focus on capturing the sensual beauty of naked skin in natural lighting conditions, stories of desperate love and loss shot in the half-light of dimly lit apartments. After having just seen the film I find that I had difficulty recalling whether Texture of Skin was shot in black and white or in color, which attests to how close the sensibility is to that of his earlier black and white animated short.

What's wonderful is that he was able to capture that same spirit in two completely different media, almost one after another. It doesn't feel like he's just jumping around doing things to make himself look like a renaissance man. It feels like he's got a personal vision, and each situation happens to require different expressive means. That's something I find lacking in most animation, even of the nominally artistic persuasion. It's good for a piece of animation to have been conceived specifically for the medium, but there almost seems to be too much of a focus on the animation at times, when the animation should be there to express something. Lee himself mentioned that this was precisely the case in the Q & A after the screening - he chooses whatever medium is necessary to express the idea at hand. He wasn't trained in animation or filmmaking but in psychology.

The dichotomy between his personal films and his commercial films is obviously striking, and it was aptly noted that the Lee present today was the Hyde to the Jekyll of Mari (though Hyde came first in this case!). But even comparing his personal films to Mari it's not impossible to identify the creator behind both. Both focus on the drab, ordinary lives of people living in a specific and culturally unmistakable place, whose lives are affected in some way when their dream-life begins to seep into their reality. One of his most telling comments was made in response to someone's question about how a person who made a film as innocent as Mari could have made a film like Texture of Skin. The translation of his response to the question was: "Generally people tend to think that there's a pure and innocent side in animation, but I think there's just as much pureness and innocence in Texture of Skin."

While watching the many love scenes in the film, I couldn't help but compare how the scenes were shot to the way such scenes are traditionally shot in Hollywood films. There every detail is precisely calculated and exposed and framed and lit to achieve the most sensuality possible, like a sexual version of food photography, coming across as completely artificial and sterile, whereas in Lee's film everything seemed natural, with normal lighting conditions and very spontaneous and unostentatious shooting. It felt like one of the film's central statements, and Lee specifically addressed this afterwards, saying that it was his way of trying to show the everyday beauty of sex, which is something that is literally mundane, something part of people's everyday lives. He was trying to bring it back down to earth from the plastic wonderland of pulp celluloid.

I was very excited about seeing this film, and I was happy to find that it was very close to what I was expecting, in the sense that it's back to the personal filmmaking of his early shorts. That he didn't consider those films an early aberration, something he'd outgrown, something of the past now that he had gone Big Time. It shows that he will continue to make the films that mean something to him, regardless of whether they're safe, saleable commodities. At least, I hope so.

Found this recent article on Kiarostami. I'm much looking forward to seeing Five. Hopefully my doing so will happen at a festival rather than on my computer monitor, so that I can properly experience it in the twilight environment he recommends. I have a committed friend who is a great admirer of the early films of his career such as Mossafer, because of the humane light they shed on his own people, but who doesn't understand the increasingly rarefied place he seems to be going lately with his newfound love, DV. I love both. I wish I could have attended that retrospective of his work, as I'm only familiar with his films. Japan has released a DVD box of his work including titles unavailable here that I've long been tempted to get.

Recent docs I've seen that greatly impressed me include Darwin's Nightmare and Born into Brothels. I had a problem with the filmmaker of the former seeming to be out of his depth at many times in the filming, posing flustered and ill-considered questions that often had the unintended consequence of shifting the focus onto the filmmaker himself, with the subject turning a quizzical eye on the man with the camera. But as was no doubt intended, any such quibbles seem irrelevant in the face of the devastating images he managed to bring back of entire villages forced to eat fried fish-heads scavenged from carcasses thrown in the dumpster after being stripped of the profitable Nile Perch fillets destined for European plates.

Tonight I turned on the TV to be surprised by a documentary about the making of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, which greatly increased my admiration for the man and his achievement. It was interesting to hear of the flood of merchandise that appeared on the scene immediately after the film's release due to its immense popularity. I doubt many documentary filmmakers bother to dream of that sort of thing now.

Despite its ominous title, Born into Brothels seems in fact to be the kind of film that could have that sort of impact on people. It was one of the most consummately crafted and watchable docs I've seen in a long time. The contrast with Darwin's Nightmare offers a good picture of the possibilities of the medium, as the styles could not be further apart, the one hobbled togehter and raw, the other hermetically constructed. The title seems somewhat ingenious, the way it plays on our expectations, only to upturn them with an unexpectedly moving and upbeat story of hope.

Correction to an old post: Maromi coming alive was done by Masahiko Kubo (久保正彦), the person who did the much talked-about car chase in Mind Game. Another new talented animator on the scene. (Millennium Actress, X, Puchi Puri Yuushi 1, 7, 11, etc.)

Just to contradict myself, I'll go out of my way to say I'm a big fan of anime directors who consider themselves filmmakers first and foremost, who just happen to be making anime at the moment, who consider the animation subordinate, and therefore are as far as possible as you can be from the idea that anime is just about the animation. If the work is good, then I agree 100%. It goes without saying that I fully realize it's not enough to have great animation for 90 minutes if the other elements aren't there to make the experience work as a film. That said, good animation is good animation, even if it's in a bad film. There can be many approaches. If I focus on animation here, it's because nobody else does. I'm not a fan of beating dead horses.

You know what I'd like to see more than anything? A DVD of Walerian Borowczyk's animation (see also). He supposedly influenced Svankmayer and the Brothers Quay, so isn't that enough to suggest it might merit a release? A lot of it is pretty racy, which I suppose may be holding things back. Three of his shorts were released on a Japanese DVD of Goto, l'île d'amour (1968) that came out a year ago, and two of the three are indeed quite risqé, to put it mildly. It would still be worth it to be able to see his early pioneering works like Renaissance (1963) and Théâtre de M. et Mme. Kabal (1967), which lead directly up to his two great masterpieces, Goto and Blanche (1971), live-action films shot through the penetrating gaze of an animator's eye. While we're at it, it's unpardonable that Blanche is not out on DVD anywhere in the world. It's surely one of the best European films of the decade. Whatever you think about his later films (which can be pretty disturbing, though sometimes in a good way), his first two films are masterpieces. I'd personally take Borowczyk over Tarkovsky or Godard any day. Even including his later works, Boro is one of the treasures of the cinema.