AIFF 2015: Saturday Preview Part 1 Daytime - Animation, Stink! And Much More

Interesting options today.  New venue - Snow Goose - so be careful you don't go to Bear Tooth by mistake.  No Festival films there today.  *means 'in competition."

So, let's do this by morning and by evening.  Morning first.

This screenshot doesn't link, go here for the links

Made in Alaska Shorts at 11am AK EX Large - See what your fellow Alaskans are producing.  For details and trailers of each film, click here.

Stink! - Is by a  dad trying to figure out the chemicals in his kid's pajamas.  You'll be one of the first  to see this.  11:45am at the SNOW GOOSE


STINK! opens in New York on Black Friday November 27th & Los Angeles on December 4. from NetReturn Entertainment on Vimeo.

A Courtship - documentary about an evangelical Christian who wants an arranged marriage.  1pm AK EX Large

Shorts - Real Life  - If you haven't seen a shorts program, go see these, there are some gems in here. And if you don't like one, then the next one comes up quickly.  But the shorts I've seen have all be worth watching.  2pm Snow Goose   (some are in competition)

Under Construction -    This is the movie to see if you want more information on the people Trump wants to ban from the US.   3pm AK EX Large

"Muslim woman Roya struggling to find herself in the sprawl of urban Bangladesh. Roya performs her last show playing ‘Nandini’—the epitome of Bengali womanhood, the central character of Rabindranath Tagore’s play ‘Red Oleanders.’ She delves into a psychological journey and battles to reconstruct ‘Nandini.’ Roya finds herself under-construction—traveling alone to exert her own desires, wishes and ambitions."

From This Day Forward - Another interesting documentary of political relevance as conservatives try to repeal Anchorage's new civil rights protections for the LGBT community.  This film is made by the daughter of a man who told his family when the kids were young, that he was really a woman.  It was difficult for the family, and the now adult daughter goes back home as a filmmaker to document their story.  Well done.  The filmmaker was here for the Tuesday night showing.   3pm AK EX Large




Very, Semi-Serious - A doc on  cartoons in the New Yorker.   4pm Snow Goose


OK, this gets you to about 4:30.  I'll post the rest of the late afternoon and evening soon.

AIFF 2015: I Found My Perfect Movie - Superjednostka

The Polish documentary short by Teresa Czepiec was the best film I've seen at the festival so far. That's a pretty strong statement and I'll try to flesh out the reasons when I have more time. For now, I'll just say, it used the medium of film to tell the story better than anything else I've seen. The camera flowed, shots transitioned beautifully. The images in this otherwise stark Soviet era housing block, were beautiful. There was no narration and relatively little talking, but the story of the building and the people who lived in it was exceptionally well told.

 I'd pick this one for the best documentary of the festival simply because it was the best use of the medium to tell its story.  To give you at least a sense of it, here's the trailer.





Unfortunately, unless the jurors agree with me and it gets an award, today was the last chance to see this film at the Festival.

AIFF 2015: Friday Overview

Is it really Friday already?   Movies start early today - 2:30pm at the Bear Tooth for the Martini Matinee which includes both narrative and documentary shorts, some of which are in competition* (Asterisks for films in competition).  A few we saw last night in the shorts program, and they're worth a second look.  The documentary shorts I haven't seen yet and am looking forward.  Since they are all packaged together, no need to tip you off.  It's better to just let you pick your own favorites.

All the evening showings will be at the Alaska Experience theater.


The evening has several features and documentaries in competition.  I'm looking forward to seeing The Creditors*.  Here's the synopsis from The Creditors' website:

"Based on August Strindberg's 1888 play, "Creditors" is a modern re-telling of Strindberg's story of love, betrayal, revenge and psychological manipulation, which he considered to be his one true masterpiece.
Grant Pierce (Christian McKay) arrives from London into Madrid, Spain, hoping to be given the chance to meet his favourite painter, American Freddie Lynch (Ben Cura), who is currently staying at a private hotel in an unassuming location outside the city. As Grant steps into the main building of "El Madroño", he finds Lynch a crippled man whom, he soon reveals, has been unable to actually paint for the better part of a year.
As the two men get to know each other under the watchful eye of one of the owners of the hotel, Michael Redmane (Tom Bateman), they start to piece together the disturbing picture of Freddie's marriage to beautiful writer Chloe Fleury (Andrea Deck) which harbours secrets that will reveal much more than Freddie's recent creative emaciation and his obsession with Chloe's ex-husbandAt times disturbingly funny and cruelly bleak, "Creditors" deals with some of the most private aspects of human relationships."

AK EXP Small  8pm 


I haven't seen this yet, so no guarantees, but it looks like one of the more ambitious films in the festival.


Here's the grid for today.  It's stretched out because it starts at 2:30pm.

This is a screen shot. Click here for the original with working  links.

Orphans and Kingdoms* is a New Zealand feature that's in competition.  AK EXP Large  9pm




CODE is a documentary about gender issues in the tech industry.  AK Exp Small 5pm

Janey Makes a Play is about a 90 something woman who writes and directs her own play.  AK Exp Large 5:00pm






And Brainwashing of My Dad  is about how Fox News has taken over the filmmakers' Dad's brain.  It says on the SCHED:

"Special “work-in-progress” screening. This is a rare opportunity to see an early edit of the film and provide valuable feedback to the director, Jen Senko."

AK Exp Large 7pm    I'm guessing liberals will have trouble with this because it's so depressingly true and conservatives will have trouble because it's so disturbingly false.

AIFF 2015: Shorts - Jury Selection - Wow, Good Show

The program just ended.   All of them were definitely worth watching.  Some were excellent.  I'm sitting in the theater during the break until Magic Utopia.  So let me just ramble and see which ones I remember.

The Story of a Rainy Night - was amazing and so sad.  A man in his Iranian apartment (more people should see Iranian films and see how well many Iranians live) on a rainy night.  He feeds a cat we never see.  Then there's a knock on the door and a daughter arrives with kids and husband.  The old man acts surprised she came.  Two more kids arrive, there's lots of commotion.  Someone brought a birthday cake.  There's talk about not seeing the kids very often.  They also brought some pizza.  We see the man from the back of the head mostly.  Sometimes from the left side, sometimes from the right, but never fully from the front.  Until near the end the camera comes around and examines him fully and closely and the audience realizes that all the visitors were an illusion.  He's been home alone on his birthday.  He lets the cat out.   When all the kids were there the subtitles were flying and it was hard to read and a linguistically talented friend said it wasn't Farsi, maybe Iranian Azerbaijani.

Nkosi Coiffure - Terrific.  Belgian lady and her boyfriend are fighting on the street and she slips in a door to escape him.  She's in an African hair salon.  One of the ladies goes outside to talk to the boyfriend and the others talk to the lady.  Wonderful film.

The Bravest/The Boldest - This one's been on the circuit a long time, but I understand why.  Two military chaplains go to tell a woman her husband's been killed.  She's in the elevator coming up from the laundry room when they get in.  She senses they're there for her.  When they get to her floor, they let her go out first, but she says not her floor and pushes another button.  The rest of the movie she avoids them as she deals with her grief.  Excellent film.

Zawadi - A Kenyan girl is sick so her mom has to stay home to watch her, so Mom tells her son he has to collect twice as many bottles today to make up for her staying home.  And the neighbor girl is upset because it's her birthday and her mom doesn't remember.  Beautifully done.

The Call - A pregnant South African prostitute, the taxi driver who's the father, a cell phone left in the cab, and a funeral.  Terrific acting.

Mike - A young man drops his brother off at the barber shop and waits in the car for him to come back.  He finally goes in to check and the receptionist says there haven't been any little boys.  Also good, but not quite at the level of the others for me.

Merry Xtmas -  This one stood out because it starred Dick Van Dyke, Valery Harper, and Matthew Modine, was full Hollywood production levels, and was short, sweet, and funny.  And a good ending to a set that started with a man waiting for his kids to come for his birthday.  It somehow seems like it shouldn't be in the mix with these other, more budding filmmakers.  But it was great.

OK, I've gone back and I missed three, but that's not a reflection on the films.  One of them - The One Minute Time Machine - was one of my favorites.   I'll talk about

[UPDATE 11:44pm - the new film was starting and I had to shut down my computer and I wasn't even sure this got posted.

One Minute Time Machine - was a romantic physics sci-fi short, with good imagination and characters.  Very clever and well executed.

The other one I forgot was Unleaded about and armed robbery that went wrong, at least from the robbers' perspective.  It was well done, fun, but again, like Mike,  not quite there with the others.


Picking the best will be hard.  For me, just based on the one I enjoyed the most, it would be One Minute Time Machine.  But I also really liked Nkosi Coiffure. plus The Bravest/The Boldest had great acting and a good twist.   And I know I'm going to see that cab driver's face from The Call in my head many times in the next week or two.

Congratulations to those who put this whole package together.  All the films were worthy, and, as I said, starting with the imaginary birthday dinner and ending with the manipulated Christmas dinner was a great touch.

Solstice Just 11 Days Away

9:50 am Anchorage December 10, 2015

10:40 am Anchorage Dec. 10, 2015

According to Time And Date:

The December solstice is on either December 20, 21, 22 or 23.

The North Pole is tilted furthest from the Sun.

It is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, where it is the shortest day of the year.

In the Southern Hemisphere, it is the summer solstice and the longest day of the year.

December Solstice in Anchorage, Alaska, U.S.A. is on
Monday, December 21, 2015 at 7:49 PM AKST(Change city)

December Solstice in Universal Coordinated Time is on
Tuesday, December 22, 2015 at 04:49 UTC

And then, days start getting longer.

AIFF 2015: Thursday's Got Great Offerings - Magic Utopia, Creditors, and Shorts Jury Selection

Everything except the After School Special and the Quick Freeze (which are more like local contests) is in competition.  Circus Without Borders looks at acrobats in the Arctic who team up with acrobats in Guinea.  Jasmine is a Hong Kong based murder mystery.

Screenshot - click here for actual schedule with links

I've been told that Japanese made Magic Utopia is the feature to see.  But it's not an easy film they say.  My early perusal of the features in competition led me to believe that Creditors is also an interesting and complex film.  You can see details and trailers  of both (and Jasmine) at my overview of the features in competition.


I'm going to pass on Creditors tonight (it's playing again Friday at the Alaska Experience Theater at 8pm)  so I can see the Shorts Jury Selection.  This program has all the short narrative films that are in competition, plus a few more.  I haven't seen any of the shorts programs yet because of the way things have been scheduled.  Tonight's the right time for me to start.

The Quick Freeze films are always fun.  The groups get three prompts that somehow have to be incorporated into a film and then have six days to make a film.  This year's prompts are:

• VHS tape
• Kiss  
• Dolly/slider shot.

 Each year these productions have gotten more and more clever and professional.  These should be good, for those of you who can sleep in late on Friday.

Here's more on the Quick Freeze for this year:

AIFF 2015: Lost And Found Eventually Lost Me

I'd seen the trailers for this enough that I was getting a bit jaded, but I had high hopes for this film.  What could go wrong?  People find tsunami debris on Alaska and Canadian beaches and track down the owners and take the things back.  International cooperation, returning lost items to disaster victims, all good fodder for a movie.  Generally the movie was good and I felt the people in the movie were sincerely trying to do some good.

But somewhere along the way it got a little cloying and annoying.  I think the underlying issue for me is the construct of helper and help.  Being a helper means you have the power to do something for another who, in this situation anyway, has less power.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't help others, but we should understand our motives and not get carried away with what we've done.  I posted long ago about charity and included some Jewish thought on charity that is relevant here, though not sufficient, I'm sure, for some to get my point about the power relationship in giving.  Part of the issue is that in Japan there is a very strong culture of gift giving and thanking.  So the degree of thanks became a bit embarrassing.  

After all, these people where doing what they enjoy doing - beach combing.  They found some stuff an said, wow, wouldn't it be interesting if we could find the owners?  So far so good.  But then they get on planes and fly to Japan and become the recipients of this overwhelming level of thank you.  I get all this.  It's my nature to try to find the person who lost something, to get something back to a rightful owner.  But I also know that it's what I enjoy doing and I'm not making any big sacrifice to help out.  I'm not interrupting my life or giving away money that I can't afford to give.  I'm just doing what I enjoy doing and if that makes someone else happy, then that's a bonus.

Kevin and kids answer questions after Lost and Found

So I was sitting there watching the film end and thinking about whether I'm being overly picky and critical.  But my gut was telling me this was a bit over the top.

And then the movie ended and one of the finders, who's from Anchorage, and his kids went to the front to answer questions.  Two things he said stood out:

• Some people weren't interested in getting stuff back or even talking to us.   Wow, that certainly wasn't in the story.  We were told about a signed volley ball whose owner hadn't been found, but not about people who weren't interested, who didn't want to be 'helped.'

• That he'd been contacted by the film makers and they were interested in his story and that they paid for his trip to Japan.   

OK.  That made more sense, because the returning of the found items and the meetings between the losers and the finders were all filmed.  So maybe that was my problem.  This was the story line for a film and the filmmakers found the folks to fit their story line.  Japan experiences disaster.  Debris crosses Pacific.  People find the debris and track down and return the debris.  What a wonderful heartwarming story.  But at least some of these folks wouldn't have gone to Japan on their own if they hadn't been encouraged and financed by the film makers.  And the film never mentioned the people who didn't want their stuff back and didn't want to meet or even talk to the people who found it.  Including that would have made this a much richer film.  But instead we got an, apparently, artificially sweetened feel good story.

It makes Ruth Ozeki's novel, A Tale For The Time Being, all the more remarkable with its richness and darkness.  This story, completed just before the tsunami hit, tells the story about a Japanese-Canadian who finds a teenage Japanese girl's diary on a beach in British Columbia.  She too wants to find the owner and return the diary.  But the story doesn't have the Disneyesque happily after after quality of Lost and Found.  The diary tells us very dark tales of life as a teenager in Japan.

That said, I have no criticism for any of the beach combers.  My sense was that they were each doing their thing and genuinely wanted to be helpful and that they all learned a lot and grew from these experiences. What I saw in the film makes me think the people returning stuff to Japan were themselves a bit overwhelmed by their reception. And it's up to the filmmakers to decide how to tell their story.  It's just that they told a story that didn't sit all that well with me. Their story put happy makeup onto a situation that wasn't nearly so happy.

AIFFF 2015: When The Circus Leaves Town

Interesting, strange characters in a small dying (dead?) town in rural Turkey.  Beautiful shots.  And the end left me, and apparently others, perplexed.  My assumption is that Turkish films today, especially if they are sent to festivals abroad, have a political and/or social meaning that Turks would get, but that is more obscure to foreigners not paying close attention to Turkey.  The images from this film will definitely be floating around my skull for a while.

But this one will stay with me.

The Japanese Counsel-General is now introducing the film Lost and Found - a documentary about earthquake and tsunami debris washing up in the US and Canada and the search for the Japanese owners of some of the things found.

[The wifi at the Bear Tooth wasn't getting this post through when I tried to post it.]

AIFF 2015: Wednesday Choices All Good

Three venues today:  Bear Tooth, the Anchorage Museum, and Alaska Experience theater.

Everything tonight is worth getting out and seeing.

This is a Screenshot so links don't work, but go to the original here to see details of each film

The green represents documentaries and the blue is for feature films.  Grey is Alaska Made.

A quick overview:

AK Experience offerings:

Madina's Dream is video of the lives of Nuba people who have been forced out of their homes in southern Sudan's Nuba Mountains.  We see and hear from the women and children in a refugee camp in South Sudan (a new separate country) and their men still is the south of Sudan (the country South Sudan was split from) who are fighting the Sudanese government in an attempt to regain their land.  A powerful documentation of the kind of thing that is happening in too many places around the world.  

The Descendants is an Iranian film about a father who goes to Sweden because the family hasn't heard from their son who is there studying.  It looks at the problems of poorer student trying to study in Western countries.  It's a good film with strong acting.  One of my favorites so far among the features.  The audience Saturday enjoyed it too - here's a link to a video of audience reaction I did.

Storis: The Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast  - from the official description:

"STORIS: The Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast is a documentary that chronicles the nearly 65 year history of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter STORIS and examines the roles it played during World War II, the Cold War, and throughout the post-Cold War era. The documentary will introduce some of STORIS's many officers and sailors as they recount the STORIS's most famous mission that helped define the Coast Guard's mission in Alaska and beyond." 

The director Damon Stuebner will be there for Q&A - always a bonus.  

All three films are in competition for an award in their categories (documentaries and features and Alaska Made.)

Museum

Two more strong films.

Children of the Arctic - is a very well made documentary about some high school kids growing up in Barrow and the pull between maintaining a traditional lifestyle and going to college and becoming modern.  The director and some of the people featured in the film were in attendance the other night, as you can see in the picture at the right when they were answering questions.   Probably the best documentary I've seen so far, though it's close.  

Eadweard - a feature that looks at the life of the man who tried to stop motion with a camera in the 1880s.  He made the famous pictures of horses running to show there's  point where all the hooves are off the ground at once.  A well made and interesting film of his work and also his life, both of which, it's implied were impacted by his having hit his head badly in a coach accident.  Definitely worth seeing.  

Bear Tooth

The Circus Leaves Town - This is a Turkish feature which I haven't seen yet.  It should be good.  I've got more details and trailers of it (and The Descendants) on my overview of the features in competition.

Lost and Found - This documentary also promises to be good.  It's about debris from the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan drifting over to the US and people finding it, then looking for some of the owners.  See a trailer of Lost and Found and for Children of the Arctic and Madina's Dream at my post on Documentaries in Competition.

Alaska Ties For Third For Most Returned Peace Corps Volunteers Per Capita

I got this list in an email today:

2015 Top States – Per Capita  (# of volunteers per 100,000 residents)
#1	Vermont	8.3 vols per 100,000 residents
#2	District of Columbia	6.5
#3	Washington Montana Alaska	4.5 4.5 4.5
#6	Minnesota Maine	4.1 4.1
#8	New Hampshire Oregon	4.0 4.0
#10	Colorado	3.8

This doesn't really come as a surprise to me.  Alaska is the state that is the most like a Peace Corps assignment and Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) are working throughout the state in all sort of roles.  Former Borough Mayor Jack Roderick is an RPCV, though his Peace Corps service in India happened after he was mayor.  Another RPCV from India is retired Native Law attorney David Case.  Scott Goldsmith, Professor Emeritus in Economics at ISER served in Malaysia, as did, if I recollect correctly, UAA Chemistry professor John Kennish.  Former UAA Chancellor Lee Gorsuch and his wife Ann served in Paraguay.  Retired doctor Jeffrey Lawrence and his wife Sharon served in Brazil.   Anchorage assembly member and former state legislator, Pete Petersen, served in the the Dominican Republic.  And there's a guy connected to this blog who served in Thailand.

2014 US House candidate and JAG attorney Forrest Dunbar served in Kazakhstan.  2014 Lt. Gov. candidate, petroleum engineering grad, and an Alaska teacher of the year, Bob Williams, served in Gambia.  

You can see some more Anchorage and Fairbanks RPCV's here   and Juneau RPCVs in this post.

UAA's Alumni Magazine for Septembr 2015 highlights six alumni who served in the Peace Corps:

In total, there have only been about 220,000 Peace Corps volunteers since President Kennedy started  the program in 1961.  And 4.5 residents per 100,000 in Alaska comes out to something over 300. [UPDATE:  A sharp eyed reader noticed that I added an extra zero to the number here.  I suspect I messed this up because I know there are way over 30 RPCV's living in Alaska and I think the number  may be closer to 300 than to 30.  Perhaps they are only counting the people who have joined the national RPCV group.]

In contrast, there are about 71,000 veterans in Alaska, about one out of ten, or 10,000 residents per 100,000 residents.

The US sends a lot more people out to wage war than it sends to wage peace.

But the Peace Corps got more applications in 2015 than it's gotten since 1975.

Sorry for the reposting - more Feedburner problems.