AFI Fest: Der Nachtmahr

Kieran wrapping up myAFI Fest in Hollywood.

German visual artist turned filmmaker, Akiz’s Der Nachtmahr immediately announces its desire to confront its audience. The film begins with a super that warns about the strobe effect, which has been known to cause seizures (supposedly) in certain audience members. It then follows it up with a second super that cheekily reads “Anyway…”

For better or worse, Der Nachtmahr's opening scene certainly live up to its lurid promise as we follow high-schooler Tina (Carolyn Genzkow) and her group of friends at a rave party. Booming, assaultive techno music fills the diegesis as we watch Tina and her friends drink, do various drugs and night swim. The flashing, disorienting strobe light effect used in the party scenes is meant to mirror Tina’s fragile mental state, which starts its dramatic decline the night of the party. She begins to see a small, alien-like creature around her house, leading her parents and her friends to question her sanity. [More...]

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AFI Awards: Mustang, James White, and More...

Deniz & AliceThe Los Angeles AFI Festival, presented by Audi, ends tonight with the premiere of Paramount's The Big Short with it's all star (male) cast. But two women we're instant new fans of were the winners. First time feature director Deniz Gamze Ergüven and second time feature director Alice Winocour both had films in the fest (Mustang, which they cowrote and Ergüven directed, and Disorder, which was titled Maryland when it first debuted at Cannes, which Winocour wrote and directed.) Mustang opens in NY & LA a week from tomorrow. Disorder is due in March next year. They're both very much worth seeing so keep an eye on these two very talented women. I know we will. 

NEW AUTEURS AWARDS

Jury:  Inkoo Kang (TheWrap), Sheri Linden (The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Times) and Nigel M. Smith (The Guardian).

New Auteurs Grand Jury Award: Land and Shade (César Augusto Acevedo)
The jury cited it's  "visual eloquence, formal rigor and emotional power" in painting a portrait of a rural family in Colombia and its observations about the explotation of the poor and environmental degradation

more prizes follow...

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AFI Fest: 5 Reasons to See 'The Lobster'

Margaret here, reporting from AFI Fest in Los Angeles..

The Lobster is the first English-language film from director Yorgos Lanthimos, Academy Award nominee for unsettling black comedy Dogtooth. The buzz since it debuted at Cannes (where it won the Jury Prize) has largely focused on its eyebrow-raising premise: in a society where being part of a couple is mandatory, the perpetually or recently single are rounded up and sent to The Hotel where they must either pair off or be turned into an animal. It's offbeat and biting and not for everyone, but it's also captivating and dryly hilarious. Here are five reasons you should check it out:

1) A bonkers premise improbably well-executed. The setup is so very odd that its ambition alone would make it worth seeing; the fact that the movie sells it without ever straining under the weight of exposition is masterful. In Lanthimos' bizarro world, where existing social rituals around courtship are both flattened and taken the extreme, lonely people scrutinize and reject each other with laughably trivial reasons and deadly serious consequences. Interactions are stilted, and many scenes sound for all the world like they've been dubbed over with a foreign-language translation, except what we're hearing are the actual words coming out of the actors' mouths. But the universe feels fully realized: odd as the relationship dynamics are, they're both internally consistent and recognizably human.

four more reasons after the jump...

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AFI: Will Smith & Gugu Mbatha-Raw in "Concussion"

There was a weird and wonderful symmetry last night watching Will Smith talk about his starring role as Dr Bennet Omalu in Concussion in front of the real man and thinking of the character we'd just seen onscreen. It was not the easy symmetry of mimicry, but of spirit. Both men are legends of their respective fields, if you will, and that's the last time we'll compare forensic pathology and movie stardom! More curiously neither man seemed willing to admit that the night's festivities were about him. Will Smith was especially humble about his performance and starstruck by the real man, admitting after Dr Omalu burst out laughing during the Q&A that followed the premiere, that he loved that laugh but couldn't manage to perfect it for the movie. Dr Omalu, in the movie and on stage kept saying that the story wasn't about him but about the science. The writer/director Peter Landisman called the movie version of Omalu a "triangulation" of the two men which is the best description possible of what we were watching on stage, the movie still fresh in the mind.

Concussion centers on Omalu's discovery of CTE, a brain disease brought on by repeated concussive head trauma, and the attempts of the NFL to cover up the physical damage on their players. A string of high profile suicides finally broke down the NFL's attempts at denial and debunking of Omalu's claims. [More...]

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AFI Fest: Disorder

Kieran, here reporting from AFI Fest in Hollywood.

There's a moment of in Alice Winocour's Disorder (French title Maryland) where Jessie (played by Diane Kruger) tentatively and almost wordlessly embraces Vincent (Matthias Schoenaerts) from behind. It's a brief, but completely earned emotional beat, perfectly emblematic of the film's power. The film is billed as a "home invasion thriller," a description that betrays Disorder's rich textures and laser-like focus on character. 

Vincent is a former soldier turned security guard working at a villa in France, inhabited by Imad, a wealthy businessman (Percy Kemp), his wife, Jessie and their young son, Ali (Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant). Vincent is suffering from PTSD and auditory problems, a result of his time in combat, which leads to bouts of paranoia. After some kind of international business deal goes awry while Imad is out of the country, Jessie and Ali become the target of hitmen, with Vincent left to protect them. This plot description could have very quickly led to something in the vein of Taken really quickly. What we get here is something far more interesting and cinematically daring.

Matthias Schoenaerts is, in many ways, the perfect actor to put at the center of this story. More...

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