Edinburgh International Film Festival 2021

These days I’ve been very busy. I got accepted to The Network (a TV scheme), and got access to Edinburgh International Film Festival and also Edinburgh TV Festival. This blog post is about the former. 

Likes: 

Out of the 4 features I saw, I liked 3: Mandibles, The Road Dance, and Ballad of a White Cow. 

I have a few times wondered if today’s films are not as good as classic films—my favourite period is the 50s-70s. But good, interesting films are still being made today, just outside the US, generally speaking. Ballad of a White Cow for example is an Iranian film, Mandibles is French. In today’s Hollywood films, I very much dislike the unnecessarily fast cutting, the random camera movements, the bad pace, the formulaic scripts, the bad dialogue... In recent years things are even worse because of the tendency to prioritise diversity (or rather, “diversity”) and social issues over quality and enjoyment, and the tendency to push for certain political messages. In addition are the dominance of superhero movies in Hollywood, and Hollywood’s self-censorship for fear of offending China, neither of which are good for the film industry. 

But interesting films are still being made elsewhere.

Ballad of a White Cow is about a woman raising alone her deaf 7-year-old daughter after her husband’s executed for murder. A year after the execution, she’s told by the authorities that he was wrongfully convicted and executed, the real murderer has now confessed, and now the heir (the daughter) would get compensation money. As she juggles between working, taking care of her daughter, trying to get an official apology from the authorities, and fighting her late husband’s family over the custody of her daughter, she gets help from a man who says he owed money from the husband before. Gradually she falls for the man’s kindness, but he isn’t quite who he says he is.

It’s a quiet, well-paced film with a brilliant ending. I noticed, each scene is made up of just one or two shots, and there are moments another director may cut to the other angle or a close-up to show someone’s face, but the directors of Ballad of a White Cow don’t do so, and it works perfectly. I also love the silences in the film (one of the main reasons I dislike the popular In the Mood for Love is the complete lack of silence in it—when there’s no dialogue, there is music, there is no silence whatsoever).

The Road Dance is based on a novel by John MacKay, about a young woman named Kirsty who lives with her mother and younger sister in a small village on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland a few years before WW1. People around her are religious, and it’s set up from the beginning that a few people remark on young men flirting with Kirsty or her being a bit too close to her “beau” Murdo. One day, all the young men in the village including Murdo are recruited to war, and the day before they leave, a road dance is organised as a way of saying goodbye. The evening of the road dance, Kirsty is attacked and raped—she doesn’t know by whom.

The film is well-done, and interesting because it raises lots of questions. It forces us viewers to ask ourselves what we would do, were we in her circumstances: Would you tell anyone about the rape? How would you find out who the attacker was? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do when the constable came to your house and asked questions? What would you do if the only person you felt you could trust was the doctor? And so on and so forth. It’s a film that may easily go wrong in many ways, because of the subject matter and the main character’s decisions, but I think they do well.

Mandibles however is a completely different animal, with none of the seriousness of The Road Dance and Ballad of a White Cow. It starts off like a cliché heist film in which a broke guy is told by a friend to pick up and deliver a suitcase, without asking questions, for 500 euros. But soon it strays into demented territory, as the main character Manu and his friend Jean-Gab discover what’s inside the trunk of the car they stole—Mandibles is about the 2 guys trying to tame and train a giant fly. It is nonsensical, it is absolutely ridiculous, it is fun to watch. 

Dislikes:

I don’t think very highly of Europa (2021), which I think is praised only because it’s about the migrant crisis. From one angle, it feels slight because it focuses on the perspective of one Iraqi migrant for the entire film, and doesn’t show the scope of the crisis, especially after the director Haider Rashid sets up something quite dramatic in the prologue. And from another angle, Europa feels like one of those films about issues that have nothing else to offer. It is dry and dull and not something you want to watch more than once.

I watched a few shorts at the film festival, and only enjoyed the one called Prosopagnosia, which is about face blindness. I hated Shagbands and Jambo Cinema, and have no interest in the rest. Excluding experimental and animated shorts, almost all the short films seem to be about social issues or to have the right political messages—it all feels heavy and suffocating. I can’t help thinking that the current environment in the West, especially in English-speaking countries, isn’t good for the film industry. Shagbands is weak and badly written, and feels amateurish, and I hate Jambo Cinema because I despise the identity politics and the filmmaker’s self-entitlement. 

Overall, it was a nice experience. These films may be hard to find, but if you can, try to get hold of Ballad of a White Cow, The Road Dance, and Mandibles, folks.