features

Giancarlo Bocchi

Italy | 2004 | 85mins | 35mm | Colour | Subtitled

Scornful of the lack of clear cut military information Lorenzi, a war correspondent, decides to venture in the heart of Balkan territory with the purpose of exposing the elusive Commander Jako, a renegade warlord who is believed to be responsible for the disappearance of an entire convoy of refugees. A local translator, Aldo, offers his services and the pair set off on their perilous journey through various warring strongholds. Along the way they pick up two others: the idealistic young journalist Maxime, and Sanja, a local girl desperately searching for her missing relatives.

Different tensions begin to mount. Aldo resents Sanja's presence while Lorenzi's relentless self-promotion and distortion of the truth disgusts Maxime who in turn feels duped by his own eagerness to believe. They track Commander Jako to the besieged city of Vaku. Lorenzi, believing himself to be close to his moment of triumph, finds out how far from the truth he actually was.

A superbly cast film. Director Bocchi's experience as a documentary filmmaker in some of the world's main conflict zones serves him well when dissecting the various ways in which truth is manipulated.

Park Chan-wook

South Korea | 2003 | 120mins | 35mm | Colour | Subtitled

One day in 1988, an ordinary man named OH Dae-su, who lives with his beloved wife and adorable daughter, with no outward reason to be anyone's enemy, is kidnapped and later wakes up to find himself in a pri-vate makeshift prison. Dae-su makes numerous attempts to escape and to commit suicide, but they all end in failure. All the while Dae-su asks himself what made a man hate him enough to imprison him without any reason. He sees on the small television that is his window upon the world, that his wife has been murdered and that he has been charged, in absentia, with the crime. At this very moment, Dae-su swears to take revenge on the man who destroyed his happy life.

Time passes. He builds his strength, makes a hopeless bid for escape. Then one day, quite without warning or reason, he's set free, given money and a mobile phone, and invited to find the man who stole fifteen years of his life.

Ultra stylish psychodrama - Michael Dwyer, The Irish Times

Winner Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival

Boris Khlebnikov, Aleksei Popogrebsky

Russia | 2003 | 105mins | 35mm | Colour | Subtitled

This simple and unadorned odyssey follows an unnamed man who after the death of his wife, takes to drink and loses his apartment. Since there is nothing left for him in Moscow, he sets off with his eleven-year-old son to take the 1000-mile journey from Moscow to his sister's home in the seaside resort of Koktebel in the Crimea. The boy has heard stories about the gliders and other birds that wheel in the air there and hopes to reach the site of his fantasies as soon as possible.

His father, meanwhile, seems content to travel at the mercy of chance, however slow their movement may be: they travel on foot and by train, earning their keep along the way with casual labour. The boy tolerates their sluggish progress for a while, but he is in the clutches of his dream of Koktebel and cannot slip into the static contentment that appears to satisfy his father. The two lost souls are pulled in different directions as they form their own desires and aspirations; the son yearns for Koktebel; while the father wishes to stay with a country doctor with whom he has fallen in love.