KIFF- Day 3

         Oh my god, am I really posting two days in a row?! Shocking, right? This is just to show how dedicated I am to my blog and all that. To recap, this is a series of posts I'm going to do about attending the 20th Kolkata International Film Festival and I will be writing them sleep-deprived/practically drunk and blah. Okay here we go-


Day 3:
1) Pasolini (Abel Ferrara, 2014)- This was a very confused movie. I felt like I needed to know more about the man to get some of the references. Also, it's been a while since I saw sex scenes in a movie being *that* pornographic. They made me pretty uncomfortable :/ The death scene is quite impactful though.

1.5) Labour of Love (Aditya Vikram Sengupta, 2014)- Okay! Okay! I walked out of a screening AGAIN and this time it's not the film's fault, not completely at least. The thing is, my friend and I went for this film to sleep in comfy reclining seats in the AC before standing in line for the next movie. To be fair, after the director introduced it, I really wanted to watch it. HOWever, I had had a really big lunch before it and that always makes me incredibly sleepy plus the film had no dialogue, at least till the point we saw/slept through it. Whatever I saw mid-siestas, I did appreciate because the film looked gorgeous. Maybe I will really like it when I watch it in my own time. So yes, I am the asshole in this case.

2) The Search (Michel Hazanavicius, 2014)- I have written about my sorta irrational issue with watching kids die in movies. It causes me too much distress. And The Search literally starts with two adorable little kids mid-warzone and it only gets more tense from there on. No, it's not a perfect movie, but goddamnit, I have not been this emotionally invested in a character's well-being in a long, long time! I squirmed in my seat, clapped, covered my eyes, covered my face and cried in this movie. I don't do any of these usually. The character in question, Hadji, is played with such sad innocence by Abdul Khalim Mamutsiev that it broke my heart. The other performances were good too. The film is an interesting exploration of the different ways war devastate lives, especially of children and young adults, and human connection in all of that. I felt that the film's title is quite misleading in that way. There is a lot going on in this film that is more than a search (unless I have totally missed some metaphorical point behind the name which is a possibility). It's also intriguing to see such a film made by the director of The Artist and I look forward to his future projects.

3) Ciudad Delirio (Chus Gutierrez, 2014)- We sat on the second row in front for this though it wasn't completely terrible thanks to the comfy reclining seats (I really love them). Still, it could have been painful were the film a bore and it was anything but that. I didn't know what it was about and I was pleasantly shocked to realize that in the middle of all these artsy fartsy serious stuff that we've been watching, which I don't have anything against as long as they don't go overboard, we had here a romcom with a salsa dance competition plot line. And it was sooooooo much fun! No, this was not an original movie by any stretch of imagination- it's literally a dance movie and a romcom put together, competition tryouts and crucial-run-to-the-airport and all, but I enjoyed myself. I wanted to, and still do actually, go dancing somewhere after watching it. It's just nice to have these light breaks in film-watching once in a while. I liked it.


            That's a wrap on today. Tomorrow, I'm going to take a teeny tiny break from the festival and finally watch Interstellar. Yaayy!!