Loft Film Festival Part 1: Overview
Loft Film Festival: Part 1 - Overview
This year I decided to completely immerse myself in The Loft Film Festival. I bought an all access pass, studied the schedule, and ended up seeing seventeen films in nine days. It was a tremendously great though exhausting experience. You wouldn’t think seeing movies is tiring, but I don’t just passively watch films. I engage with them, think deeply about them, make connections. To top it off, I watched films from all over the world, so I was constantly changing languages, cultures, countries.
That was part of why total immersion was so great. America has become so excessively inward looking since the Trump election. I enjoyed spending nine days completely off the internet and seeing creative output from so many places around the globe. One takeaway that I want to share is that watching narrative films grappling with very difficult issues (issues that are largely universal) is much more rewarding for me than watching documentaries explaining issues. Narratives and fictional representation of human struggles, puts the viewer in the position of the character and allows the audience to experience rather than be told what to think. I found it much more effective. Many of the films I watched dealt with xenophobia, culture clashes, race, class, resilience, and the complexity human legacy (traditions, mortality). Across the spectrum of films I watched, I’d have to say that for the most part, (in)tolerance was the core issue that many films addressed, and none of them refused to give simple answers or any answers. They left room to think, insisted we ask questions, and they allowed a space for hope.
One challenge of committing myself to embracing the breadth of the film festival was playing curator. The Festival offered a total of 47 films over a nine day period, which the Loft itself had curated. I had to study the offerings, consider my work schedule and timing, and then curate my own list of films I could and wanted to see. I originally picked 21 films. I ended up seeing 16. The films that got cut from my list were cut either because I realized they played too late or because I couldn’t get off work early enough to see them. Still, being a working mom with high pressures in my life, I made it to 35% of the films offered, and attended 80% of my own curated list. I have the catalog, so I can watch the ones I missed at a later date. For the most part, I saw everything that I really wanted to see. Out of the 16 films, I watched, only one was a total dud because it infuriated me. I ranked all the films I watched, and this is my final ranking, best to worst:
- Sami Blood (Amanda Kernell, Sweden, 2016)
- The Other Side of Hope (Aki Kaurismäki, Finland, 2017)
- White Sun (Deepak Rauniyar, Nepal, 2016)
- The Cakemaker (Ofir Raul Graizer, Germany/Israel, 2017)
- The Desert Bride (Cecilia Atán & Valeria Pivato, Argentina/Chile, 2017)
- The Ballad of Lefty Brown (Jared Moshe, USA, 2017)
- Dog Years (Adam Rifkin, USA, 2017)
- Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World (Catherine Bainbridge & Alfonso Maiorana, USA, 2017)
- Gook (Justin Chon, USA, 2017)
- Faces Places (JR & Agnès Varda, France, 2017)
- Jane (Brett Morgen, USA, 2017)
- Brimstone & Glory (Viktor Jakovleski, Mexico, 2017)
- Awake, a Dream from Standing Rock (Myron Dewey, Josh Fox & James Spione, USA, 2017)
- My Friend Dahmer (Marc Meyers, USA, 2017)
- I Am Another You (Nanfu Wang, USA, 2017)
Providing this list of my “ranking” of the films points to another challenge - trying to rank the films. Ranking is unfair to them. So many of them stand in their own right, and I don’t think it is fair to put one above another, though clearly the top two rise to the top (and really are tied for #1 in my mind). I found myself constantly switching the rankings even as I typed my list here. Maybe the rankings should just be: 1) Watch; and 2) Don’t waste your time. In that case, I think only I Am Another You is the only don’t waste your time movie, for reasons I will explain later. I guess you could watch it to see why I disliked it so much and which itself will show how even a bad film can provide new ways of seeing if you think about what makes it bad.
For now, I offer you a list of films which I recently watched, and perhaps you too someday can watch them. I will write about the films briefly in individual installments over the next few days and then try to bring everything together into a single piece of writing for publication. I figure I need to start somewhere. It is a big undertaking to write about so many films at once, so I am following the advice I often give others: proceed in bite sized chunks. My first bite is an overview.
My biggest takeaway from the festival was the hope I felt from experiencing so many films grappling with the same difficult issues that we as a human race face regardless of our country, religion, and culture. The films I watched were tender and complex, and they did not shy away from beauty. They often mixed humor with harsh reality, just as in real life laughter can sometimes get us through the toughest times. Aki Kaurismäki is the master of this approach to cinema. The films didn’t shy away from the many difficulties that we face as humans, but they also offered such varied perspectives and open-endedness that allows room for dialogue - to think, connect, reflect.
Also, seeing so many films from different countries (though the bulk I watched were from the USA) gave me an opportunity to journey across the globe via the human landscape and witness human interactions with the environment and with each other. It broke loose the wheels stuck in the 140 character cogs of the claustrophobic environment of fake news and hyperbolic distractions. Instead, they showed through often small moments, deep infinite truths that allowed my heart and mind room to breathe, to travel, and to be more sensitive and open.
Stay tuned for my reflections on the films I watched. I want to take my time and not rush. The films deserve my time. I’ll post my writing in installments and then post the link to my final published piece when it’s complete.
Cheers. I’m going to go get ready to go to a movie! Hah.