Post-pandemic picture show
The reason this website/blog/online journal started in the first place was to record my impressions of the copious number of movies I was seeing at film festivals. Since then times have changed.
Over time my attendance at film festivals slowed down. Then the film festivals stopped—or at least went online in cases where they weren’t canceled altogether. But now things have come full circle. For Christmas and my birthday (which are kind of the same thing) I received a surprise gift from my offspring and spouse: a full-festival ticket to this year’s Dublin International Film Festival. I guess they figured they could afford now that I qualify for the senior citizen price or, as it’s charmingly called here, the OAP (Old Age Pensioner) rate. They left me no choice. I was morally bound to see as many flicks as I could during a 12-day period so as not to waste their generosity.
There was something symbolic about the whole thing since the 2022 DIFF coincided with the lifting of almost all Covid restrictions in Ireland. At the beginning requirements for masks were still in place. By the end of the event, the masks had pretty much all come off.
Because the event was obviously planned well in advance, it still had remnants of the restrictions days. Many of the films were both screened in a cinema and streamed online. Given that lodging was not included in my gift package and hotels in Dublin are pricy and getting pricier, I elected to spend two long weekends in the capital and stream films at home the rest of the time. (Transportation to Dublin was graciously comped by the Irish government, since we OAPs get to ride the trains, trams and buses for free.)
As DIFF was happily celebrating its 20th iteration, it was nice to be a part of so much of it. After all I was at the very first edition of the current version of this film festival back in 2003 and have popped in for several of them since. The final tally? During the week and a half, I saw 15 feature-length films, one of which was a documentary, and 49 short films. I saw ten of the feature films in cinemas—mostly the lovely underground Lighthouse in Smithfield (which doubled as the site of the Berlin Wall in Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) but also at the Odeon in Point Square and at Cineworld at the Parnell Centre. Five features were streamed from home. Two of the shorts programs (a total of 17 films) were seen in cinemas, while four programs (32 films) were streamed from home. That works out to 64 films overall. Not a bad score for an OAP.
You can find links to all my reviews, reactions and thoughts on my DIFF 2022 Journal page.
Film festivals are like a world tour. Somehow I managed to avoid most of the Irish films, although I did catch virtually all the Irish shorts, as well as several from other countries including an interesting half-dozen from Scotland. Features I did see were filmed in such far-flung places as Tibet (the gorgeous, mind-bending Bipolar), France, Spain, Texas, Morocco (standing in for Somalia in my favorite flick of the festival Escape from Mogadishu), Belgium, Croatia, Italy, the UK and Sweden.
Given that the festival’s second day was marked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a kind of pall hung over the proceedings. Art reflected distant but visceral reality with movies invoking the inhumanity of armed conflict, notably Terence Davies’s Benediction with its archival footage of the First World War and Escape from Mogadishu with its recreation of the 1991 Somali civil war. Among the shorts, no film evoked the horror of war like Eliane Esther Bots’s documentary In Flow of Words about the experiences of language interpreters working in The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
One film, however, stands out among all of them. By coincidence on the festival’s fifth day we saw Elie Grappe’s Olga about a young Ukrainian gymnast who is sent into exile during the Euromaidan protests of 2013. On one hand, it seemed all too current with its archival footage of violence in Kyiv. On the other hand, it seemed like ancient history. Back then Ukrainians were rising up against their own (pro-Russian) government. The Revolution of Dignity, as it was called, ended hopefully. Sadly, that hope now flickers perilously.
Watching movies for hours at a time is a nice escape, but at times like this having the privilege of escape comes with more than a little guilt.
-S.L., 12 March 2022
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