Tonight I took in some movies at the San Francisco Greek Film Festival. There are many films I'd like to see, but this was the only night I had available. Three shorts and a feature:
First up was "Kypseli", which is "hive" and a very congested neighborhood in Athens. Though the film plays on the pun, most of the shots show a bunch of fairly empty streets, as if someone is shooting a film in town or something. A pair of yuppies sit at a cafe, and the woman discovers that her phone is gone. First they blame a Pakistani street peddler, and get him arrested, and then they realize that an old Greek woman stole the phone. They confront her and find out that the Greek economy has turned to shit. Also, the Pakistani is deported. Fine, I guess.
Then there was an American film, "Athanasios"—another bit of title punnery. It's a Greek name and means immortal. We have immigrant papou, and his punk kid American grandson who enters his shoe-repair shop (shot in an actual Greek-owned shop in SF's West Portal neighborhood) bleeding from some altercation with no good kids. "A paper cut", papou says, who was shot in the neck by the Nazis during the War and lived. Immortal! And after a little first aid, now the American kid is proud to be Greek again. A very personal movie. Indeed, perhaps so personal the director didn't even realize that he didn't actually tell the story. However, it was beautifully shot. Meditative and cool, with clever long shots in the American scenes and hard, stark close-ups in the flashbacks,
Then came "The Palace", by my once long-lost cousin Anthony Maras*. Here's the trailer:
I'd read the script when he was in pre-production, and saw the film on my computer months ago thanks to a password-protected Vimeo link, but this was the first time on the big screen. Disclosures aside, this was the film of the night. It's easy to make a sentimental film about Cyprus, and it's easy enough to portray a bunch of rampaging Turks. He managed to avoid all that, to build some descent tension, and to create a real character in the form of a young Turkish soldier who really just wanted to go back to the UK and become an actor. Extremely worthwhile.
Then there was the feature, My Blood. A crazy art film about a woman and a man who might be two men, and one of them is the son and the other the husband, but they are the same, and the woman feeds them blood and demands to be loved forever and 90 percent of the shots are extreme close-ups and the score is a constant dubbubdumbbubdubbubdumbub so the whole thing feels like a ninety-minute long trailer for a fourteen-hour long film. Really, just watch the trailer sixty-three times and you get the movie:
There's a certain ambition to the film, and it's admirable in its way—the budget was zero, and the director bartered everything, trading space for lights, the lights for sound editing, some sound editing for...all the way down the line. Bigger or Better, but starting with nothing. (It is fairly easy to make a ninety-minute film in most of the shots are just of half of someone's face or tit.) And it was artsy and "tasteful", though my sensitive cousin Nikos left when the pot full of blood came out. (I encountered him in the lobby when heading to the bathroom.) But for all its strengths, My Blood was still just an exercise in tedium, with a dash of suspicion toward women.
All in all, a nice if sometimes challenging evening, and I can't wait for Anthony to make a feature.
*Facebook, for all its faults, is great for finding members of the branche of the family that emigrated to the Congo, and then on to Australia, in the years after the Greek Civil War.
First up was "Kypseli", which is "hive" and a very congested neighborhood in Athens. Though the film plays on the pun, most of the shots show a bunch of fairly empty streets, as if someone is shooting a film in town or something. A pair of yuppies sit at a cafe, and the woman discovers that her phone is gone. First they blame a Pakistani street peddler, and get him arrested, and then they realize that an old Greek woman stole the phone. They confront her and find out that the Greek economy has turned to shit. Also, the Pakistani is deported. Fine, I guess.
Then there was an American film, "Athanasios"—another bit of title punnery. It's a Greek name and means immortal. We have immigrant papou, and his punk kid American grandson who enters his shoe-repair shop (shot in an actual Greek-owned shop in SF's West Portal neighborhood) bleeding from some altercation with no good kids. "A paper cut", papou says, who was shot in the neck by the Nazis during the War and lived. Immortal! And after a little first aid, now the American kid is proud to be Greek again. A very personal movie. Indeed, perhaps so personal the director didn't even realize that he didn't actually tell the story. However, it was beautifully shot. Meditative and cool, with clever long shots in the American scenes and hard, stark close-ups in the flashbacks,
Then came "The Palace", by my once long-lost cousin Anthony Maras*. Here's the trailer:
I'd read the script when he was in pre-production, and saw the film on my computer months ago thanks to a password-protected Vimeo link, but this was the first time on the big screen. Disclosures aside, this was the film of the night. It's easy to make a sentimental film about Cyprus, and it's easy enough to portray a bunch of rampaging Turks. He managed to avoid all that, to build some descent tension, and to create a real character in the form of a young Turkish soldier who really just wanted to go back to the UK and become an actor. Extremely worthwhile.
Then there was the feature, My Blood. A crazy art film about a woman and a man who might be two men, and one of them is the son and the other the husband, but they are the same, and the woman feeds them blood and demands to be loved forever and 90 percent of the shots are extreme close-ups and the score is a constant dubbubdumbbubdubbubdumbub so the whole thing feels like a ninety-minute long trailer for a fourteen-hour long film. Really, just watch the trailer sixty-three times and you get the movie:
There's a certain ambition to the film, and it's admirable in its way—the budget was zero, and the director bartered everything, trading space for lights, the lights for sound editing, some sound editing for...all the way down the line. Bigger or Better, but starting with nothing. (It is fairly easy to make a ninety-minute film in most of the shots are just of half of someone's face or tit.) And it was artsy and "tasteful", though my sensitive cousin Nikos left when the pot full of blood came out. (I encountered him in the lobby when heading to the bathroom.) But for all its strengths, My Blood was still just an exercise in tedium, with a dash of suspicion toward women.
All in all, a nice if sometimes challenging evening, and I can't wait for Anthony to make a feature.
*Facebook, for all its faults, is great for finding members of the branche of the family that emigrated to the Congo, and then on to Australia, in the years after the Greek Civil War.