AIFF 2011: Skype Chat from Holland With Best Animation Winners

All the animated films I saw were good in some way.  This was the category I tried to know best and I've gotten some video on most of the film makers whose films were in competition.  I had this conversation with Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter Dec. 7 (Anchorage time).  They were delightful to talk to and they give us a sense of the life of serious animators.  They are currently in Holland on a grant for animators.



Ru lived in Anchorage for a couple of years as a child when her father, who worked for Japan Airlines, was located here.  She clearly was disappointed that she couldn't be here for the festival, but they promised to submit what they are working on now when it's done in 2013.

And you can see the film that won Best Animated Film at the Anchorage International Film Festival last week.

North Korea's Kim Jong-il Dead

From Thai Visa:

PYONGYANG (BNO NEWS) -- The Supreme Leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, died of physical fatigue on early Saturday morning, state-run media announced on Monday afternoon. He was 69 or 70 years old.

The state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim died at around 8.30 a.m. local time on Saturday. It said he died of physical fatigue during a train ride, but gave no other details.

UPDATE 9:10pm - from Reuters:

By David Chance

SEOUL | Mon Dec 19, 2011 12:45am EST

(Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported on Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.
A tearful television announcer dressed in black said the 69-year old had died on Saturday of physical and mental over-work on his way to give "field guidance."
Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's youngest son, is seen as the leader-in-waiting after he was appointed to senior political and military posts in 2010.
North Korea's official KCNA news agency said the elder Kim died at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday (6:30 p.m. EST on Friday) after "an advanced acute myocardial infarction, complicated with a serious heart shock." Kim had suffered a stroke in 2008, but had appeared to have recovered from that ailment. . . [continue here]

From Wikipedia:

Soviet records show that Kim Jong-il was born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk, in 1941, where his father, Kim Il-sung, commanded the 1st Battalion of the Soviet 88th Brigade, made up of Chinese and Korean exiles. Kim Jong-il's mother, Kim Jong-suk, was Kim Il-sung's first wife. Kim Jong-il's official biography states that he was born in a secret military camp on Baekdu Mountain in Japanese Korea on 16 February 1942. Official biographers claim that his birth at Baekdu Mountain was foretold by a swallow, and heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow over the mountain and a new star in the heavens. In 1945, Kim was three or four years old (depending on his birth year) when World War II ended and Korea regained independence from Japan. His father returned to Pyongyang that September, and in late November Kim returned to Korea via a Soviet ship, landing at Sonbong (선봉군, also Unggi). The family moved into a former Japanese officer's mansion in Pyongyang, with a garden and pool. Kim Jong-il's brother, "Shura" Kim (the first Kim Jong-il, but known by his Russian nickname), drowned there in 1948. Unconfirmed reports suggest that five-year-old Kim Jong-il might have caused the accident. In 1949, his mother died in childbirth. Unconfirmed reports suggest that his mother might have been shot and left to bleed to death.. . [More here.]

And the New York Times weighs in with a lengthy piece.

Only 24% of college graduates know the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.

That's a finding from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).  

A comment (6:47pm) on Immoral Minority  led me to ISI's website with a civic literacy test.

First, a random sample of 2,508 American adults of all backgrounds was surveyed, allowing comparisons to be made between the college and non-college educated. They were asked 33 straightforward civics questions, many of which high school graduates and new citizens are expected to know.

 The average score was 49% right answers.  College professors got 55% right.

Of the 2,508 People surveyed, 164 say they have held an elected government office at least once in their life. Their average score on the civic literacy test is 44%, compared to 49% for those who have not held an elected office. (From additional finding.)

But don't gloat too much.  We don't know what level office they held and the 49% - the average - got an F grade from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) which created the test.

One of their major findings was:   College Adds Little to Civic Knowledge.

Red flags are starting to wave for me.  One of the agenda items of the Right has been bashing American colleges and universities - because they've strayed from traditional Western Civilization curriculum and added women, non-whites, and studies of sexuality beyond the missionary position.   Colleges are places where people are supposed to learn how to think independently.   If the quality of this year's roster of Republican presidential candidates is any indication, independent thinking is not a quality conservatives want in the people who vote.

Just like No Child Left Behind was designed for public schools to fail by setting up a testing system that makes it very hard for schools to pass so they can imprint in people's minds that public education as a failure, there appears to be a similar agenda for the college level.  For K-12, this destroying trust in public education is designed to get the public to vote for school vouchers and move public money into private schools.

It appears that part of the motivation of this test is to show that US Colleges are failing.

Is ISI part of this?  I started checking. 

The ISI declares itself "The Home of American Intellectual Conservatism."

A Katherine Forrest, in 2006,  had the same sort of suspicions I'm having and posted Exposing the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.   

ISI's  veneer of objectivity and rationality disappears completely when you find their college rating pages. (You have to look carefully to find at the bottom of each page this note: 

"CollegeGuide.org is a project of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Inc. - www.isi.org"

They list ten "Exceptional Schools" and ten "Train Wreck Schools." 

What the train wreck schools seem to have in common is courses on gay and feminist themes and other evidence of what ISI sees as far left ideological intolerance. Here are some examples:


#1 Train Wreck School, Wesleyan University:

". . .Wesleyan has been hollowed out by curricular decay and campus politics. Key requirements can be checked off by a vast array of questionable courses like “The Biology of Sex” (the textbook is a sex manual), “Key Issues in Black Feminism,” and “Queer Literature and Studies.” There is little intellectual diversity in the classroom or elsewhere. Shakespeare is optional for English majors, as is study of the American founding and Civil War for history majors"

 #3 Train Wreck School, College of the Holy Cross:

". . .The sole required religion course need not cover Jesuit, Catholic, or even Christian content: Islam or Buddhism will do. . ."

#5 Train Wreck School, University of California Santa Cruz:

Bastions of fanatical political correctness include feminist studies and also American studies, where representative courses include “Sexual Identities,” “Social Unrest,” and “Criminal Queer.” Santa Cruz boasts that it offers more than a hundred courses each year that focus entirely on race and ethnicity. It might save time simply to count the courses that don’t. The once-tiny Santa Cruz College Republicans chapter has simply disappeared, although there is a libertarian group, Slugs for Liberty. “This is a very liberal campus,” says a student, “[and] religion does not play a role.”

 #6 Train Wreck is Duke, which actually gets high praise for liberal but fair faculty and the quality of research and many programs.  But it gets slammed for:

". . . the infamous lacrosse case of 2006, when an African American stripper falsely accused three Duke lacrosse players of rape—and eighty-eight Duke professors rushed to condemn the innocent students in the Chronicle of Higher Education. As one student tells us, faculty and administrators are still fixated on “race, gender, and class.” In the wake of the “rape” charade, Duke adopted a new, draconian sexual misconduct policy that “can render a student guilty of nonconsensual sex simply because he or she is considered ‘powerful’ on campus,” warned the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "

 #7 Train Wreck is Bryn Mawr.

"History majors are not even offered—much less required to take—a basic Western civilization class. Many of the college’s humanities courses are dedicated to feminist issues and the politics of victimhood, such as “The Sociology of AIDS” covering the “social construction of AIDS”; “Anxious Masculinity” (an English class); and “African Childhoods,” which provides a “gendered perspective . . . Concerning indigenous cultural practices such as initiation ceremonies and sexual orientation.” Radical groups predominate on campus, presenting a feminist “May Hole” instead of a May Pole, and celebrating Wiccan Sabbats."

#9 Train Wreck is Occidental College.

“Gay Rights in the Era of Obama and Google”

That’s the title of a real, core curriculum course at this urban school, where President Obama went for two years and awakened his political consciousness. Students could find an excellent liberal arts education by carefully picking their courses, if they don’t mind immersion in an almost exclusively liberal, largely intolerant school.

Their study methodology includes frequent references like, "says a faculty member."


What's the common theme for the  top ten "Exceptional Schools"?   Basically, conservatism, marked by traditional curriculum (mostly dead white male authors on the reading list, I'm guessing), religion (Christian) and/or military heritage.

1.  Princeton University -

". . . Of all the elite colleges, Princeton is the least politicized. Issue-driven organizations are diverse and mostly high-minded, and chaplaincies of many denominations are active and faithful. While the faculty overall leans left, most keep their views out of the classroom. The school makes room for the excellent James Madison program, a conservative institute dedicated to American political philosophy. . ."

2.  University of Chicago  -

". . .While some departments are slanted politically, this doesn’t seep into the classroom; students of a wide range of views describe the atmosphere as comfortable and open-minded. Strong disciplines include economics, social thought, political science, and the hard sciences. Chaplaincies are strong here, and opportunities to savor the fine arts abound. The gritty [code for "black"?] neighborhood surrounding the school doesn’t encourage much urban adventure: crime is a real issue. . ."

3.  University of the South

". . .Faculty lean to the left of students—a largely conservative, southern lot—but classroom bias is rare and free discussion the rule. Students form close, lifelong friendships in the charmed, safe isolation of Sewanee’s campus, and alumni are fiercely loyal. Religious life on campus is strong, extending well beyond the school’s official, high-toned Episcopalianism. . . ."

4.  US Military Academy

". . . The discipline and focus imparted through the school’s rigorous Military Program help form many future business leaders. West Point’s core curriculum is excellent, and the art, philosophy, and literature (APL) major provides an in-depth study of Western civilization. History and government majors are particularly strong, focused respectively on military history and the American tradition. . .  Following our tradition of an apolitical military, the school keeps overt ideology out of the classroom, and students avoid partisan politics. Student debate, writing, and arts opportunities are strong. Religious life of many varieties thrives, with several historic chapels and talented choirs."

5.  Pepperdine University -

"This well-heeled, large university that overlooks the beach is affiliated with the Churches of Christ, and remains remarkably true to the entrepreneurial aspirations of its founder and namesake, George Pepperdine. It aims at cultivating a pragmatic graduate who infuses Christian values in a life of leadership. Pepperdine’s interdisciplinary curriculum is strong; its three-course core sequence, Western Heritage, takes students briskly from 30,000 B.C. up through the present. . ."

6.  Baylor University - "the world’s largest Baptist university'
7.  Providence College - " Dominican friars (Aquinas’s order) who are serious about Catholic education"
8.  Texas A&M - "Originally an all-male military academy (it still has a large, influential corps of cadets. . . conservative churches and chaplaincies are thriving"
9.  Gordon College - "New England’s only traditional, Evangelical Christian liberal arts college"
10.  Christendom College -

"Instead of political correctness, there is an absolute expectation of Catholic orthodoxy; debates on campus are among Republicans, anticapitalist agrarians, libertarians, paleoconservatives, and monarchists. Shared premises make such disputes more fruitful."

I'd also note that while there were three colleges I noted on the Exceptional list that had been all male, the Train Wreck list has two all female schools.  


But does all this make the test invalid?  As with No Child Left Behind, you can set up a test that doesn't necessarily have questions that are critical to being good American citizens.  Or a scoring system that guarantees failure.  Some of the questions are clearly important.  Others, while identifying significant points in American history, aren't necessarily indicative, overall, of whether the American public gets an F in civil literacy.  These folks like traditional education, so they make up a test and use a traditional grading scale of >90%= A etc.  But what makes these 33 questions the key ones that lead to the F for the average American?

And I still have trouble with their finding that "College Adds Little to Civic Knowledge" because:

The average score among those who ended their formal education with a bachelor’s degree is 57%, or an “F.” 

Who picked the 33 questions?  Look, I can criticize the low quality of American colleges as well as anyone.  My students complained regularly about the amount of work I expected of them.  And, just in case anyone is wondering, I did way better than the average on the test.  But it was a subject I know a lot about and covered a lot of history I lived through. 

I  agree that Americans know way too little about how government works.  I don't necessarily agree with ISI's reasoning why.  I'd argue it has more to do with the annual assaults on school budgets for the last 40 years or the emphasis on research which focuses faculty attention away from teaching.  Or the overemphasis on college education and away from vocational education.

I would guess that I could pick some 20 somethings in Anchorage who could come up with a similar test, focused on critical modern technical literacy, which the people at ISI would fail. 

If you are interested, you can take their test here.  How well will you score?

Brilliant Stairs to Kitchen Homicide - Imaginations Pushing the Ordinary

I'm a sucker for things that cause my brain cells to shift.  So here are a few links to websites that do that.

For example, stairs are pretty straightforward.  Almost all are basically the same.  There is some variation, like spiraling staircases, but the idea has pretty much been exhausted, right?

Well look at the 20 sets of stairs offered at Mdolla to remind you that there's always a new way to conceive of something we take for granted.  Like these on the right.

I don't think you could legally put these in a house in Anchorage. 






  Divine Caroline makes us revisit logos to make sure we've seen the whole logo, like the images in the empty spaces in this logo for the Pittsburgh Zoo.  There are 15 examples, some I see every day, but don't really see, like the hidden symbol in the Fedex logo.  Do you know what's there?








A Crazy Bag of Hammers gives a sampling of these ordinary objects bent-wired into about 20 mini-dramas like this apparent kitchen homicide.


And it's well worth your while to go to Bent Objects itself for more and varied brain candy like a poster for any billionaires planning a protest.

Don't Mess With My Stereotypes - The "All American Muslim" Ad That Lowe's Pulled

[UPDATE 6:50pm:  Ha!  Too good to be true.  See the first comment.  So what was the ad they removed?]

Does anyone not know that Lowe's pulled an ad on the tv show "All American Muslim" because a Christian group in Florida had a letter writing campaign protesting it?

I first thought they were simply protesting that Lowe's supported a show with positive views of American Muslims. But now I've seen the ad itself.

I can see why they would want it pulled. It plays to all their stereotypes about evil Muslim terrorists and then dashes them. Can't let people see such powerful hate antidotes.

Thanks to Gryphen for posting it.

Esther Hong: Transformation of Canvas

There's a little art gallery next to the entrance of the UAA library and it had a wonderful exhibit when I went by yesterday: 

Transformation of Canvas.

I didn't get the title at first. 

I just knew it was cool.










The one above is from the one just to the left.

I just fell in love with the texture, the designs, the muted colors, the imagination, and the perseverance.

Then in the center of the room I saw this canvas covered 'bench' with a video screen of two hands pulling off threads from  . . . a piece of canvas.  And there were pieces of canvas and the little tool she was using there for me to do the same.  And that's when I got it.  Transformation of canvas.

December 16 is the last day of the exhibit.  That's today.  Friday.  At UAA near the entrance to the Consortium Library.  Parking is free on Fridays.

Winter Roads Make Winter Trails All That Much Better

It began snowing about October 30, and I've been able to get in at least twice a week workouts shoveling new snow. I don't remember so much snow so often. The result is that our street is getting narrower. Some of us have been able to carve out parking spots, but most of the street space is now three to four foot high berm - five or six feet wide. People are parking creatively.






After ten days of film festival, I was ready to for bit of a walk, so I took some books back to the UAA library.  Here's the biketrail/sidewalk cut out of the snow. 

Driving the last few days has been as bad as I can remember. (It could be dementia that I can't remember that well.)  The car rattles along the street.  Walking across it was easy to see why.  Lots of random ice humps.  I guess the heavy snow followed by warm followed by cold again allowed for some artistic freezing designs.  And terrible driving conditions. 

The snow plow guys must be exhausted and frustrated.  They've done a pretty good job getting our street cleared, but not picking up the snow.  And now the streets are awful. 










But walking the bike trails on campus is going off into a winter wonderland.

AIFF 2011: How Could A Zombie Musical That Cost "a lot less than" $50K Win Best Feature?

[We saw the last part of the movie again Wednesday night (after seeing the winning shorts).  The visual and audio quality of the movie was significantly better, and the story was clearer.]





This blog is called "What Do I Know?" because a basic theme is the question that underlies everything we know - "How do we know what we know?"  A variation of that theme is:  "How do what know what is true and what is good?"   These are questions that people ask themselves too seldom.

So, when we talk about 'the best' film, there are lots of underlying assumptions about what each of us means by best.  In 2008 I outlined my criteria, as best I could, and related them to movies in that festival.  Let me pull the four headings out now and see if they help me explain why this film is a worthy winner.

Example of Interesting Lighting

Ink diffusing across the screen

• Technical Quality A continuum from.. shaky...no problems..very good..innovative. 

Some films have a combination of more than one of these which makes it harder to judge.  In a movie, good sound makes up for poor video.  Think of Blair Witch Project or home-made YouTube footage of police confrontations.   Dead Inside had a few technical issues I noticed - the voices in the musical numbers were sometimes too low compared to the instruments and the music itself might have been a bit louder.  There were a couple of spots that seemed unintentionally out of focus.  But there were also many great shots throughout.  They played with the light and dark and color.  With spaces and shapes.  The make-up of the zombies would have been good for a high budget film, but was incredible

Max and Harper

for this very low budget movie. I'm not sure what the spreading inky images signified, but I like them.  They told us, in the opening scenes, that something supernatural was coming.  (Good, Steve, you don't think we got that from the zombies walking through the desert in the opening scene?)
And I like the editing.  The transitions worked for me and the background music and sounds helped a lot.

• Content -
  Content is probably the most variable issue, since what interests me may not interest you.  But any story, done really well, no matter the subject, will capture any one. And while for most movies the narrative is key, great  movies that intentionally leave the narrative fuzzy or have no narrative, can offer important alternative ways to use film.  (And if you want to push this further, not having a narrative becomes itself another narrative.)  But this is far riskier to pull off. 
  
  
  There's a vague continuum for me that roughly goes from bad to good:

Disrespectful ...Boring...good story....original...currency...high positive impact
  Bad...................................................................................................................Good

Writing The Story As Part of the Story

This film has a narrative and themes, though after one viewing there are still  loose ends for me.  I saw the overarching theme as a variation of the Orpheus story. A lover (Wes) goes to extremes to get his love (Fi - pronounced Fee) back. In this case a ghost takes over Fi's body and Wes has to figure out how to oust the ghost and help Fi reclaim her body.  Another theme is the difficulty of creating a work of art/literature.  Fi is a writer with writer's block.  We watch her sit, fingers at the keyboard, writing, then erasing.  But the story she's writing seems to be the script in the movie.  Emily (the ghost who takes over Fi's body) tries to write Fi out of the story.  I think that basically Fi was writing a zombie script and I'm still not sure about the relationship between the zombies (Max and Harper) and Fi and Max [Wes. See I'm still a bit confused.]  They are the same actors and sometimes we have Max with Fi.

I haven't thought through all the possible themes, but I'm sure with enough time I could come up with half a dozen that the film makers never even thought of.  In some cases that's part of what good art does - allows, even pushes, the audience to think and to gain insights into their own lives reflected in the art.  

• Use of Medium. Movies combine sight and sound and movement, verbal and non-verbal messages.  The best movies are those that take advantage of the medium completely.  They tells stories you can't convey as well in other media.

Three photos on wall

This is a very visual movie, but it's also very auditory. After all, it is a musical. This is not an adaptation of a book.  This was conceived as film (or the digital components that make up film today.)  One device I liked was the use of three photos on the wall.  When we first see it, we see Fi in the left hand frame reaching out, Wes in the right hand frame reaching out to Fi, and the two hands not quite touching in the middle frame. (Symbolic of the main theme.)  Throughout the film we see these photos, but sometimes they change or the characters move into the frames and act out the story in the background on the wall. 

[Note:  The photos are saved frames from clips of the movie taken during the showing.  I didn't have the dvd to carefully pick my examples from.  You'll see them again in the video.]

• Whole Package. Even with weaknesses here and there, a film could pull it off by doing some things so well that the problems don't really matter. 

It's the whole package that had audience members smiling in amazement at the end of this.  This was truly an independent movie, the kind that film festivals are all about.  It is ridiculously ambitious.  It's conventional enough to be accessible to most viewers, yet it breaks rules to make a film that's not your every day cookie cutter film.

And one has to acknowledge that one of the wonders of this film is that its budget would have been used up in less than a minute on a major Hollywood set.  The  budget factor is something I've written about before in evaluating movies.  Just as in diving and skating, where you can get more points for trying something more difficult, film makers, in my scoring system, get more points for doing more with less.  It's like including miles/gallon in evaluating a car.  One could argue convincingly that Kinyarwanda or The Wedding Party or Inuk should have been best picture.  They were all good movies.  And they each had their emotional tugs to claim the prize.  And with different judges any one of them might have won.  And people might criticize the selection of The Dead Inside.

But I give the judges  a lot of credit (as did others I talked to) for recognizing how much this film did through improvising with almost no money.  (I said to Travis after seeing the film, "This was great for a movie under $100K."  He laughed and said, "Way under."  I then said, "This was great for a movie under $50K."  He laughed and said, "Way under.")

I don't want anyone to think this wasn't a very good movie that got the award because it cost so little.  It was a very good movie.  The film makers had to be creative.  It was all done inside their apartment, with the exception of the opening scenes in the desert.  There were five people involved in the production. (More in post production.)  They found ways to tell their story with the budget they had.  And I haven't mentioned the music much.  There's a whole musical in here - a very credible one.  As I listen to bits of it on a couple of clips I took during the showing Saturday, I realize how good it is and how important the music and sound is to the movie.

I don't think I exaggerate when I say that most people (pretty much everyone I talked to) were surprised that The Dead Inside won best picture, but happily surprised.  It's the kind of thing that should happen at film festivals.  One could make a movie about this.  This is an important film maker, early in his career.  Whether this is the peak or just the early signs of greatness remains to be seen. 

Here are some clips from the film.  These are intentionally crooked and include much more than the screen so no one will think I'm trying to bootleg the film.  And since I only took a few random shots without knowing what was coming, it's, well, random.  But it gives you a hint at the film that's different from the trailer which you can see here.

The video offers some illustration of the points I made - that this is a musical with good music, there are good visuals, the inky blobs, the zombie makeup, and bit of how they go in and out of the three pictures over the bed. 


The actors - who sing the original music themselves - are Sarah Lassez and Dustin Fasching.  The music is from Joel Van Vliet.  The film has a strong website that gives some background of the characters.

AIFF 2011: No Love Tonight, But Meet You at Apartment in Athens at 7:15pm

I emailed AIFF features coordinator Tony Sheppard to get some more information about the film Apartment in Athens.  It appears our showing is the North American premiere.

I was conflicted between seeing Apartment or Love Me To Death which I missed the first time round.  But it turns out the copies of Love You To Death have gone missing.

So, unless something happens between now and 7pm, Love You To Death is cancelled according to the email I just got.  I don't have to make a decision.

The only film tonight is 

Apartment in Athens.  7:15pm Alaska Experience Theater.  Tonight (Tuesday).  

This is a seriously good film.  I just posted about it here.  When it was first supposed to play, Sunday Dec. 4, the DVD didn't last past the first 15 minutes or so.  It kept stopping.  I haven't been able to find anything using the English title on Google except the Anchorage International Film Festival.  Using the Italian title (the film is an Italian film, but the 15 minutes I saw were in German and Greek [Italian]), I found that the world premiere was October 14 at the Bombay International Film Festival.  It played again - and won best film - at the Rome International Film Festival about Oct. 22.

I can't find any record of it playing in any US or Canadian film festivals.


[UPDATE Dec. 17:  I wasn't as impressed with the whole movie as I was with the view of the beginning I had a week earlier.  Most of the movie was shown in the wrong aspect ratio which made everyone look shorter and stouter.  Then about 60 minutes in, the disk stuttering problems started again.  The projectionist switched it to his Mac for the end of the movie and the aspect ratio seemed better and there were no problems.  But the technical problems didn't help my appreciation of the movie.  But this was an adaptation of a novel, and I think that trying to get the whole novel into a movie meant subtleties were lost.  The significant change in the German officer when he returned from Germany is explained, but it still seems extreme - especially given how he subsequently acts.  Perhaps in the novel this is better explained.

But this is a good movie that raises interesting questions about how humans use and react to power with a number of interesting twists to make it more complex.  The father's role is perhaps the most interesting.]

AIFF 2011: An Apartment in Athens or Love You To Death?

[UPDATE:  It's not totally clear, but this could be the North American premiere of Apartment in Athens.]

I haven't seen Love You to Death because it was playing at the same time as In The Shadow.  The good news is that Love You to Death was the runner up for Audience Choice Award for best feature at the festival, so it is playing again tonight in Best of the Fest.  The bad news is that it's playing at the same time as Apartment in Athens.

Both appear to be very good films.  Love You To Death got the Audience Choice Award Runner Up for feature films at the Anchorage Festival.  Apartment in Athens was Best Film at the Rome International Film Festival in October. 


Love You to Death begins at 7pm and An Apartment in Athens at 7:15pm.  Both are at the Alaska Experience Theater (mall at C St. and 4th Avenue.)

I saw about 15 minutes of Apartment last week, before the disk started stopping.  It got so bad they shut it down and tried a second disk.  It did the same thing.  I've talked to Brandon McElroy who was the technician.  I'll do a post on the topic of glitches during the film festival, an issue that has bothered film makers and audiences alike over the years.  Brandon has given me some explanations for why it happens and what we'd lose in order to make it rare.  And film makers I've talked to say it also happens in much bigger festivals than Anchorage.

Because Athens didn't get played during the festival, they are showing it again tonight.  If they can get a disk that works.  (It's in PAL format which limits the machines here that can use it.) 


Apartment in Athens

Image from Appartento Ad Atene

Athens felt like a very good movie for the short part I saw.  It takes place in WW II when a German officer moves into the apartment of a Greek family.  The officer takes a fancy to the young ten year old daughter.  The father is troubled but hopes that with the officer in the house, they might get better food rations.  The mother is upset, but knows how to act properly in front of the officer.  The 12 year old son doesn't hide his anger.  And that's about all we saw.  But it had the makings of a powerful movie.  And a translated Italian review suggested this was a film which explored deep issues about freedom and subservience.

The image - the only page of the movie's website - says it won Best Film at the  Rome International Film Festival last month. An Italian Website says its world premier was to be at the Bombay Film Festival (ironic that Yuki Ellias, actor in Love You to Death, is from Bombay).  It was scheduled in Bombay October 14.    It's based on a 1945 novel by Glenway Wescott.  From Wikipedia:

. . .  Wescott was born on a farm in Kewaskum, Wisconsin in 1901. . . He studied at the University of Chicago, where he was a member of a literary circle including Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Yvor Winters, and Janet Lewis.  Independently wealthy, he began his writing career as a poet, but is best known for his short stories and novels, notably The Grandmothers (1927). He lived in Germany (1921–22), and in France (c.1925–33), where he mixed with Gertrude Stein and other members of the American expatriate community; Wescott was the model for the character Robert Prentiss in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.


. . . Apartment in Athens (1945), the story of a Greek couple in Nazi-occupied Athens who must share their living quarters with a German officer, was a popular success. From then on he ceased to write fiction, although he published essays and edited the works of others. In her essay on The Pilgrim Hawk Ingrid Norton writes, "After...Apartment in Athens, Wescott lived until 1987 without writing another novel: journals (published posthumously as Continual Lessons) and the occasional article, yes, but no more fiction. . .

[See further comments made after seeing the whole movie here.]

Love You To Death
An Anchorage friend who was born and raised in India had high praise for Love You to Death.  It's not a typical Bollywood film, but an alternative look at the same old stars and same old ways of making Indian movies, she said.  It's in Hinglish - a mix of Hindi and English.  As you can see in the video below, the star's English is excellent.  There are subtitles when needed. 
Here's the video I got of Love You To Death actor Yuki Ellias when she was in Anchorage last week.