MAMI Film Festival Not my ‘first time’
wordlessly senses his likely fate will haunt me for life. It showcases primal fear, disillusionment and abject helplessness. For me, Harry Melling’s performance was the best in this year’s festival and it made the frantic rushing from film to film, the travelling between theatres and the mixed Food Court fare seem all worth it.
My favourite film, from the ones I managed to fit into my three-films-aday schedule at the festival this year, would be a tie between
and In the Netflix-produced, boldly black-andwhite Roma renowned director Alfonso Cuaron tells us about a young domestic worker, Cleo, who is played with admirable restraint, early exuberance and eventual stoicism by newcomer Yalitza Apricio. In 1970s Mexico, Cleo is impregnated and deserted by her lover who has a gift for martial arts, but not marital arts. By a synchronicity of fate, her story is paralleled by that of her employer Sofia, who is also abandoned, financially and emotionally, by her husband. Cuaron poignantly captures Cleo’s love for her employer’s children and her mixed feelings towards her own unborn baby.
It’s an intimate story from the director of the grand space saga, Gravity, but Cuaron adroitly advances his tale through well-integrated domestic episodes (the children's outing to the cinema chaperoned by Cleo and a harried grandmother, a visit to a country estate during the forest fire) as well as magnificently captured crowd scenes such as the street clashes between armed militia and demonstrators. Tragedy waits to strike, whether within the barricaded walls of the family home, or on the streets, or at the hospital, but the bonding between the two women touchingly crosses the barriers of class and race.
Abandonment is the running theme in Spirited Zhao takes the rap for her gangster boyfriend only to find that he has deserted her when she emerges after a five-year prison sentence. Fortunately, internationally acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke does not make it into another revenge saga but, instead, closely examines the unique dynamics that make them reconnect, against the backdrop of a rapidly changing China.
Heiresses from Latin America presents a woman coming to terms with her own abilities, and Ana Brun deservedly won the Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival. She plays Chela who has always led a privileged, cosseted life and even has her medicines served to her with her breakfast... just so. But when a financial crisis hits and her lesbian lover is sent to jail, Chela learns that she is not so hapless, and is indeed capable of negotiating with life on her own terms. Another Latin American film
may be often too whimsical for its own good with some seemingly stray scenes, but it spoke to me. A teenaged boy, Lucas, hankers after his old friend Sophia, but she grows fascinated by an older city slicker as well as the idea of living with her mother, who doesn't care for her. Lucas’s mother can't let go of her memories of him as a child despite his obvious irritation. And young Clara has reclaimed her lost dog Frido from the child who found it... but now finds the pet unresponsive except to a new name – Cindy. In this delicate dance of yearning and letting go, Clara (who says “Only on the outside” when she is told she is too young) learns... and teaches us, a valuable lesson.
It’s cinematic moments like these that make a festival for me. Sign me up for 25 years more.