AIFF 2020: Best Narrative Feature - Festival Picks and Mine (Equan Choi's My Son)

It's late February.  This is long overdue, so let me get this done.  Here are the Festival winners in the best Narrative Feature category.  (Narrative Features are the films most seen in movie theaters - fictional stories over an hour or so long.) [Note:  My strong favorite film was Equan Choi's My Son. I mention this here, because as I wrote this, it comes up at the end.  And because this film was overlooked by both the Jurors and the Audience in their awards, I want to be sure it gets people's attention, even if they don't read the whole post.]

First, the Juror Awards.  Jurors are part of the film festival, people selected by the Festival director, who know something about film.  Because our festival director is a Norwegian film maker, she reached out to film makers she knows around the world.  These are not people from Anchorage.  That's neither good nor bad theoretically.  It depends on how well she chooses the jurors and the purpose of the awards and how much they should reflect Anchorage.  

Narrative Features

2nd Runner Up  - Last Days of Capitalism

Runner Up - The Woman In the Photographs

Winner - Dinner in America

Audience Awards.  One could argue that the audience awards add the Anchorage flavor to the awards.  

Narrative Feature - 

2nd Runner Up -  Paper Spiders

Runner Up -Foster Boy

Winner - Dinner in America

Category	Juror Award Winner	Audience Award Winner	Steve's Award Winner
2nd Runner Up	Last Days of Capitalism	Paper Spiders	see discussion
Runner Up	The Woman In the Photographs	Foster Boy	see discussion
Winner	Dinner in America	Dinner in America	My Son

First off, I'd say that Narrative Features was the richest category in the festival.  There were lots and lots of excellent films.  

Second, I think the Jurors picked better movies than the Audience.  But that they are all very good films.  

Third, I'm not really a fan of forced ranking.  Given a film that is technically sound - the video, the acting, the sound etc. are well done - it's the content and feel of the movie that matter.  And even films that are technically imperfect can have content that overcomes that.  So, this means that whether a film is good or not depends on how the content of the film resonates with the viewer.  And that usually depends on the viewer's life experiences and the emotional connection a viewer has with the characters and the issues in the film.  So different viewers will legitimately prefer different films.

I'm guessing that the Jurors were looking at the films as film as much as the content, while the Audience was more focused on the stories and characters.  Paper Spiders was about a daughter whose mother is losing her mind.  It was a very well told story.  Very moving.  Foster Boy was also well told - a trial movie about a young black man who was abused by the foster care system.  I'm guessing this didn't show up in the Juror Awards because it was a very Hollywood movie - including some well known actors.  If the Jurors are like me, they are looking more for 'film festival' movies.  Movies that break the mold, that take risks, that you would be less likely to see at a theater. (I realize some may be asking "What's a theater?" in this time of COVID.) 

The Last Days of Capitalism straddled between those two categories.  It was a perfect COVID film - just two actors in a hotel suite in Las Vegas.  It's a really good film.  I saw it early in the festival and it immediately became my film to beat.  You can see the Trailer here, but I'm not putting it up here because it really doesn't reflect the verbal (almost athletic) competition between the two characters that made this movie.  

The Woman in the Photographs was at the top after I saw it.  This Japanese movie about a photographer and his model is definitely in the film festival category. It explores the nature of reality - is it what the woman actually looks like or is it how the woman looks in the photograph. Especially current in this age of social media and online dating.  This was definitely one of my favorites.  

Dinner in America - This film with a seriously flawed main character who made terrible decisions was, nevertheless, a joy to watch.  Not quite mainstream, not quite festival, it was a real surprise and I understand it being the winner for both the Jurors and the Audience.  There are lots of videos out there with the film's crew, but I couldn't find a trailer.  

BUT, I think there were at least two more movies that fell through the cracks because there was so much good stuff.  

The Subject - This leans more into a festival type film.  A privileged white male film maker who sees himself as trying to give voice to black gang members in his 'cutting edge' films, finds out that he's really not gotten much beyond his own self.  There's another withering dialogue at the end of this film between the film maker and the angry mother of one his film subjects.  The film raises lots of questions about documentary film making and exploitation and doing harm while trying to do good.  For a while this was my favorite film.  

In the end, Equan Choi's My Son, one of the last features I watched, became my favorite.  I'd put it off as long as I could.  The story of a Korean father taking care of his severely disabled son.  It sounded like it was either going to be a sappy story of love and happiness or a terribly depressing movie.  Neither sounded appealing.

But I was so wrong.  This was absolutely the most intimate film of the festival.  Yes, there's a father with his teenaged paraplegic son.  The father's sister who helps look after the son.  There's the mentally disabled teen hired to help with the son.  And there's the father's secret married girlfriend that he visits weekly.  Each character becomes a full person with strengths and flaws and the relationships between the characters - both one on one and as a group - are developed.  This is truly a masterpiece and I'm sorry it got missed by both the Juror awards and the Audience awards.  And it forces the audience to recalibrate their definition of disabled, forces them to remember there is a real, human being inside every body, with a whole spectrum of hopes and feelings and opinions.  

There is so much in this film.  The boy's adolescent need to pull away from his father and become his own person against his father's belief he must look after the boy who can't take care of himself.  The teen caretaker who is physically and sexually adult, but has his own mental defects that cause him to make bad decisions, and how he helps the boy become himself, independent of his father.  The sister/aunt and her caring for the boy and her brother yet resentful of how much they take of her life.  The girlfriend (the father goes to his - I can't remember exactly what sport, maybe bowling - activity each week, but really he's going to visit his girlfriend whose husband is in the military and away most of the time) also becomes a full person when the father becomes ill and she comes to the house to find out what's wrong.  It is then when all the characters interact, when the boy becomes his father's caregiver.  There's so much in this film.  I'm sorry I waited to the end to watch it, when I didn't have time to watch it again.  In my mind, this was the very best feature film in a festival with excellent feature films.  

  [I couldn't find a trailer for My Son.]

If you have the chance to see any of the films mentioned in here, grab it.  They are all worth watching.