helsinki international film festival / rakkautta & anarkiaa, 2012.
돼지의 왕 / King of Pigs, South Korea.
An animated film about two bullied friends who reunite to reminisce a mutual friend who stood up to the systemic bullying they all endured at middle school. This really cut deep into all kinds of societal problems and the issues created by social hierarchies and economic hierarchies in modern South Korea. It was an absolutely brutal watch, and the animation is not afraid to look ugly when the situation demands it. I'd recommend it, but I doubt it's rewatch material. The ending left both me and my friend silent as stone when we walked out of the theater; there are no easy answers, and all of the characters are as damaged as the next.
Magi i luften / Love is in the air, Denmark.
Shortly after King of Pigs, I went to see this teenage musical from Denmark about four youngsters and their love trials and tribulations that takes place during one night of partying. The whole film is bathed in surreal disco lights, reds and pinks and purples backlighting every scene, which gives it a very psychedelic feel, almost. As I commented on Facebook: "It's like if you took four of the most boring Glee kids and made them do party drugs in Denmark." That's essentially the film's biggest problem: the characters are boring. Lina wants to be a popstar, Daniel wants to have sex with Lina (and like annoying teenagers often do, he confuses this feeling with love), Stefan acts tough to keep himself in the closet and Therese just wants to lose her virginity. Stefan's coming-out brings some amusing moments, but otherwise these are just damn boring characters stuck in a weird film. And the songs most often feel out of place and even more bizarre.
Keep the Lights On, USA.
A relationship drama between two men that initially meet over a phone hook-up line. This was another dud for me, despite being a good film in terms of technical aspects - the cast is good, the cinematography and the way it's shot is just beautiful, and for some part, I was genuinely invested in the story. But in a way that's perhaps realistic, the story just meanders and while there are some powerful scenes here and there, it ends up being pretty dull. I suppose in the greater scheme of things, this is a pretty good gay-themed film in the sense that unlike so many others, it's not strictly speaking a love story, or a coming-out story. I just found it frustrating as I'd hoped it was better (based on what I'd read) than it actually ended up being.
Dicke Mädchen / Heavy Girls, Germany.
A middle-aged man's mother suffers from dementia and is visited daily by a social worker while the son goes to his job at the bank. This 90-minute film was filmed on digibeta, and the shoe-string budget film was mostly improvised based on two pages of script. Considering this production history, it makes sense for Heavy Girls to be as strange as it is, but also as poignant and heart-warming as it ends up being. Essentially it's a love story between the two men (the social worker and the son), and the story gets peeled like an onion, with a new layer of funny, and goofy, and tragic, and sweet. It's a strange little film, and therefore I can't quite decide how I feel about it; there are things I love about it, and things I'm not sure what to even think of. But if you can see it, I'd recommend it, for sure.
The Imposter, USA.
A documentary about a French man who tricked the authorities in Spain into believing he was a missing kid from Texas, which began a "rescue mission" that ended with him in a foreign country, in a strange family that didn't suspect him in the least. This was probably the best film I saw at the festival. I'd heard about the French imposter previously and read an article on him, but was still surprised by the film - the interviews of everybody involved shows cleverly how other people, too, lie and trick to impose their own agenda on the situation. I won't spoil anything but the story only gets stranger as the film goes along, and in the end, you wonder who's the one hiding the most - or whether you just got tricked by the man at the center of the film. It's a really interesting film and definitely worth catching, if you can.
tl;dr I made some bad picks but none of the films strictly speaking sucks, so not a total dud of a festival experience. I blame their Bollywood pick sucking so bad I didn't go see it (it was Ishaqzaade, by the way) and the Ace Attorney film which I REALLY wanted to see only airing on days I couldn't make it to Helsinki.