New Directors/New Films

Curling

Winter Vacation

 Attenberg

Octubre 

 

I'm finally getting around to posting on the 2011 New Directors/New Films festival a day after it wrapped up. The two best films I saw, Denis Cote's Curling and Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg, are very different looks at a father-daughter relationship which exhibit striking formal qualities while not sacrificing deep emotional resonances. Attenberg intercuts a semblance of a story with delightful improvised shots of the two girls doing Monty Pythonesque "silly walks" or walking slowly arm-in-arm a la Fassbinder's Katzelmacher (a reference the director acknowledged in her Q&A). Curling makes stunning use of its bleak wintry Quebec landscape to tell a mysterious tale of an emotionally shut-down father and his lonely teenage daughter, played by a real-life father and daughter who appeared at the film's MoMA screening.

Li Hongqi's Winter Vacation uses long, still takes beautifully to depict the aimless despair of a group of young Chinese kids in a remote small town with deadpan humor. And Daniel and Diego Vega's Octubre also uses wry humor to show a reluctant relationship between a lonely moneylender and the woman who helps take care of the baby he is suddenly saddled with as the result of one of his many visits to prostitutes. The sense of community in this poor neighborhood of Lima is wonderfully developed.