Neil Young, in Norway for the Bergen International Film Festival, has seen plenty to wash away the blues and whet the appetite
THE Bergen International Film Festival, held annually in Norway’s second-largest city since 2000, has two of the crucial elements which can usually guarantee a successful cinematic event: a lot of rain and a lot of students. This year’s BIFF unspooled from October 15- 22, an unusually wet spell even by the standards of this beautifully hilly coastal region, and the youthful Bergeners required little persuasion to seek shelter – and culture – in one of the two neighbouring city-centre multiplexes which form BIFF’s main venues.
As with the 2007 event, a principal emphasis was on films dealing with human-rights issues. Twenty-five features were gathered together under the “Checkpoints” banner, examining tough political, economic and social topics in countries ranging from Vietnam (Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath’s The Betrayal), to, topically enough, the Democratic Republic of Congo (Lisa F Jackson’s The Greatest Silence). This year’s BIFF took place in the same month that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, in Norway, to Finnish diplomat Marti Ahtisaari, and the “Checkpoints” programme was just the latest example of the importance which Nordic and Scandinavian countries place on humanitarian issues. Many human rights organisations are located in this part of the world – including the Rafto Foundation, which has its headquarters in Bergen and co-funded not only the “Checkpoints” programme but also some of the features within it, such as Andrzej Fidyk’s very fine documentary Yodok Stories.
This is an offbeat, oblique but powerfully harrowing approach to the horrors of North Korea’s concentration camps. It made for timely and depressing viewing in the week that the country was officially taken off the United States’ official “terror list” – a decision which will probably appal anyone who watches this particular film. The set-up initially seems contrived. Unable to take his cameras into the camps, the director instead arranges an elaborate all-singing, all-dancing musical on the subject to be staged in Seoul, with much involvement from defectors who had first-hand experience of their horrors.
The (questionable) merits of the play itself – a kind of ‘”Springtime For Kim Jong-Il” – are secondary to the fact that its creation proves such an effective means of bringing these particular stories, and they do comprise a catalogue of the most shocking atrocities, to the wide audience they deserve.
Also dealing with issues of self-expression and music within an East Asian context is another Norwegian documentary, Rock Heart Beijing by 30-year-old feature-debutante Karin Winther. It’s an hour-long profile of China’s leading punk band, Subs, and specifically its sparky, female lead-singer (and main songwriter) Kang Mao. We follow Kang Mao and her fellow band members around China (where they complain that the affluent consumer society of the cities is too cosily complacent to have much appetite for raucous, confrontational music) and then on their tour of Europe where they encounter a range of receptions. Kang Mao is the fulcrum holding it all together, an open and indefatigably persistent presence. Subs themselves are a pretty tight outfit – like the movie itself, they’re watchable, while adhering pretty closely to accepted conventions of their chosen sub-genre.
The band themselves were present in Bergen, where they performed at one of the many nightclubs in the city – likewise the grizzled Canadian veterans of the semi-legendary heavy-metal outfit Anvil, in town to promote the screening of Sacha Gervasi’s raucously entertaining profile/tribute documentary Anvil! – The Story of Anvil. Very much in the vein of This is Spinal Tap (except totally for real) the movie will be released in Britain early next year, and it’s one to look out for – even for those who don’t know their Def Leppard from their Judas Priest.
Likewise, here’s an early “heads up” for Synecdoche, New York, whose British release date has yet to be confirmed at the time of writing. A British release is a definite, however, not least because this is the long-awaited directorial debut from Charlie Kaufman – the screenwriter responsible for Being John Malkovich, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – and also because it features a high-calibre cast headed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, supported by our very own Emily Watson and Samantha Morton.
Synecdoche – the unwieldy title is a pun on the name of real-life upstate New York city Schenectady and also a typically high-falutin’ linguistic reference from Kaufman – is quite dazzlingly brilliant for its first half (of a 124-minute running time), but then the gas goes flying out of the creative balloon and the remainder is something of a dour slog. This wildly original tale of a crack-up theatre-director (Hoffman) – who copes with his hypochondria and painful private life by devising an insanely elaborate autobiographical play in an implausibly colossal Manhattan building (the Norwegian title translates, rather charmingly, as “New York in a Nutshell”) – explicitly unfolds within its protagonist’s head, although without ever directly tipping the wink as such the viewer in the usual conventional style. Indeed, Kaufman bravely rejects convention and expectation at every turn, although even he can’t avoid falling into that all-too-predictable creative trap: debutant overreach. It’s certainly worth a look, however, when it does wash up on our shores.
