Seattle International Film Festival May 19 - June 12

SIFF’s Emerging Masters series, acknowledging four young filmmakers from around the globe who have films at this year’s fest, awarded the program’s Emerging Masters award to Attila Janisch, the Hungarian filmmaker whose Long Twilight (1997) and After the Day Before (2004) appeared last weekend. Janisch’s Escher-like narratives in both films invert waking dreams and nostalgia with loneliness and alienation. Both films share similarities featuring solitary individuals traveling through Hungary’s pastoral landscapes in search of a lost past connecting them to the earth and the present. The late summer twilight and verdant countryside in both films – with their hidden mysteries – envelop their central characters, as they encounter strangers who regard them with stern suspicion like lost travelers trespassing on the wrong side of the road. Adapted from Shirley Jackson’s meditative story of aging, personal memory and private ghosts, Janisch’s Long Twilight presents the central character’s confusion in dream-time haunted by repressed memories of her childhood.

While Long Twilight succeeds with its crafted simplicity, After the Day Before drifts listlessly across the Andrew Wyeth-like tableaux. The central character, in search of an inherited property in the countryside, comes to symbolize his vulnerability in his social and physical environment. Unlike the character in Long Twilight whose presence may or may not be a spectre revisiting her past, his past eludes him in a cloak of secrecy. Both films, while visually compelling but requiring patience, bring to the table portraits of a troubled psyche in an environment of anxious longing and fear.

As an Emerging Master, it is difficult to compare Janisch to Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang Ke, whose films in competition -- Platform and The World -- resonate more substantially. Jia Zhang Ke ‘s films carry weight in crafting narratives that look at recent changes in rural Chinese culture and contemporary Beijing’s symbolic emergence in the “new” China. And both films offer stylish distinctions: Platform’s earth-bound dustiness suggests the passage of time at the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution; The World pierces through the colorful scrim of globalization and technology, conveying an immediacy with interpersonal communications, but questions their authenticity and enduring value. The other filmmakers in this competition include Argentine filmmaker Pedro Trapero (Crane World and Rolling Family – both of which screen June 11at SIFF) and Susan Bier (Brothers and Open Heart) from Denmark.

Not in competition in the Emerging Masters program is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s lyrical and haunting film Tropical Malady, which won last year’s Jury Prize at Cannes – a first for Thai cinema. Weerasethakul’s new film -- which I’ve seen at last fall’s Vancouver International Film Festival and this past weekend at the Harvard Exit -- weaves together obsession and folkloric narrative with some of the most alluring photography set in suburban and rural Bangkok and in Thailand’s humid and lush jungle. Tropical Malady joins two narratives with the broad theme of obsession in the form of seduction, inspired by Thai author Noi Intanon’s stories. The film begins with a quote from Intanon: “All of us are by nature wild beasts. Our duty as human beings is to become like trainers who keep their animals in check.”

Opening in the jungle as a small group of soldiers mechanically yet pleasantly photograph themselves around a dead man lying in the brush, Weerasethakul establishes a tone carried throughout the film. The scene’s unanswered questions mediated against Intanon’s quotation give way to Bangkok’s bustling backstreets, where Tropical Malady unfolds the dance of desire between Keng (Banlop Lomnoi) a young soldier and his affection for Tong (Sakda Kaewbuadee), an ice factory worker and young military veteran. Their budding friendship and quiet attraction gently develops over driving lessons, a visit to a fabled cave with a Buddhist altar, and motorcycle rides in the sunny countryside. Both Keng and Tong share flirtatious times together at a seafood karaoke restaurant and at a cinema, but when Keng attempts to draw Tong in to an intimate moment on a back road later one evening, Tong disappears with a warm smile into the darkness.

Tropical Malady merges the film’s first half into the second half in a small country house. Tong wakes up in a bedroom and vanishes in the sunny morning; in a transitional scene, Keng wakes up in the same place to study an old photo of Tong pictured with a navy buddy. Here, the film becomes fixed with a compelling and silent character study in the humid jungle. In contrast to the film’s breezy first half, the film evokes a quiet seriousness, drawing the viewer in to a soldier’s hunt for a shaman who has taken the guise of a tiger. The tiger leaves clues for the soldier (Banlop Lomnoi) -– a man’s footprint becomes a paw in the rain-soaked mud –- and the narrative features inter-titles describing how the tiger preys on villagers in the jungle after dark. The predator-prey tension exposes the man’s inner conflict about how to approach fate. A chirpy baboon communicates to the soldier about handling the dilemma with the tiger: either “free him from this world or let him devour you to enter his world.” In the taut silence in Thailand’s back country, the soldier confronts a difficult choice.

Obsession is often a manifestation of desire, but sometimes it is rooted in fear and anxiety. In Tropical Malady, obsession and desire, at times, evokes subtle ambiguity for the viewer, but what is clear is Keng’s passion and the soldier’s sweat-browed hunt. Two other films from this past weekend, Uno and Dias de Santiago, present stark portraits of its central characters in distinctive and stylized works. The existential choices posed for the characters in Uno and Dias de Santiago erupt with confrontation and fear; desire is absent except for the will to struggle and survive against adversity.

In Aksel Hennie’s film Uno -- named after the card game, David (played by Hennie) is a young weight-trainer at a small Oslo gym that enters a web of hostility from fair-weather friends who exercise at the club. The film’s trajectory spikes after David blows the whistle on the gym owner’s son Lars (Martin Skaug) who is seen illegally selling steroids to gym patrons. After a police bust at the gym, David betrays the gym owner and Lars when they are rounded up and sent into the police station jail by identifying Lars to police. David’s motivation to betray Lars is costly choice: either sit in jail for Lars’ actions, or leave to attend his father’s bedside at a hospital where he is dying from cancer.

Uno is an adrenalin-rushed film that gradually tightens with tension as David’s story unfolds. Family and friendship loyalties are tested and sometimes pitted against each for David, and at its center are his failing efforts to placate his interpersonal ties which threaten to crush him. Shot with handheld DV in a rainswept monochromatic blue-black-and-slate gray palette pierced with amber and hunter green, Uno has a sharp-edged visual style that glistens with its nocturnal atmosphere. The only thing distracting from this accomplished work is the EMO-imbued shoe-gazer guitar folk songs on the soundtrack. The film would have more muscle if the musical selections were stripped from the production unnecessarily commenting on David’s inner turmoil, and to give it a leaner Dogme Group film quality.

Similarly, Dias de Santiago from Peruvian filmmaker Josué Mendez depicts a former navy veteran suffering from a moral crisis about how to reenter society and find an established path towards work and education. Former military friends seek to pressure him to participate in a bank heist for a fast track to riches, but Santiago (Pietro Sibille) – in an effort to keep anger and frustration at bay – avoids the pitfall of entering into their scheme and sticks to his own path. At school, girls flirt with him after class, particularly when they find out he runs his own taxi service. Three young girls try to seduce him into afternoons of fun hanging out a disco, while he neglects his dysfunctional family and a seldom-seen girlfriend at their modest apartment. Santiago’s internal pressures can no longer be contained after discovering news of his former friends’ bank robbery on the news, bringing the stress of their collective experience in the jungle and his own familial troubles to an eruptive release by film’s end. Photographed alternately in grainy black and white and washed-out color, Mendez crafts an engaging portrait of a young man’s private struggle to break with the demons haunting his moods in Lima’s harshly sunlit streets.

For more information about these and other films included in this year’s 31st Seattle International Film Festival, check out http://www.seattlefilm.com/ for details. SIFF screenings are held daily at select Capitol Hill, University District, and Lower Queen Anne theaters. Additional events will be at EMP, neumos, and the Guild 45th in Wallingford. SIFF’s three-week run is from May 19 – June 12. Tickets now available online, and at Pacific Place downtown and at the Broadway Performance Hall on Capitol Hill.