I heard about the Maine International Film Festival for the first time a few months ago. I was chatting with legendary cinephile Brian Darr (whose blog Hell On Frisco Bay remains one of this site’s chief inspirations, although he has been posting mostly on Letterboxd and Twitter lately) about this year’s Nitrate Picture Show, which we were both hoping to attend. Although he wasn’t ultimately able to make it, we somehow realized that we would both be in Maine (us to see my father and his wife) at the same time this summer, and when Brian mentioned that there was a pretty good film festival in Waterville, we decided to meet up there instead.
Brian had other plans the first Tuesday evening we were in town, but on his recommendation I decided to check out 20,000 Species of Bees, which he said had been getting good buzz (his pun, not mine!) on my own. The film is about a crucial summer in the life of eight-year-old the world sees as a boy named Aitor, but who is beginning to identify as a girl named Lucía. Actress Sofía Otero won a Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at this year’s Berlinale for her performance in this role, and the honor was well-deserved. She embodies a character whose calm exterior masks a storm raging within, which is extremely impressive for someone who just turned ten a few months ago. First time feature film director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren also deserves kudos for the balancing act she performs. Bees teeters on the edge of tragedy for nearly the entirety of its two-hour runtime, but resists pat resolution of either the unbelievably happy or unnecessarily sad variety, culminating in a forest search scene that had my fellow audience members calling out to the people on screen. They mostly got what they wanted, but I doubt it was as cathartic as they were hoping it would be. Which, that’s real life for you! Patricia López Arnaiz is very good as Aitor/Lucía’s sculptor mother, and the supporting cast is excellent as well. This movie deserves to be widely seen and I hope to see it show up in Ithaca later this year so that I can recommend it to everyone.
The MIFF program included a strong contingent of repertory screenings, but the chance to finally see Werckmeister Harmonies made choosing between them easy. I’ve long suspected that director Béla Tarr represented one of my biggest cinematic blind spots and now I’m certain of it. Nearly two-and-a-half hours long but consisting of only 39 shots, the film is an allegory of the cataclysms that befell Europe during the twentieth century. It opens with a magnificent long take set during closing time at a bar in an unnamed town. The drunks refuse to go home until local mailman János (Lars Rudolph) organizes a dramatization of a solar eclipse. Had this been the only indelible image Werckmeister left me with, I still would have been glad to have seen it. This isn’t even the movie’s best shot, though! That could be the almost unbearably long march of a mob to the hospital where they intend to unleash chaos, unless it’s the one at the end of this scene in which, chagrined by the site of an perilously frail old man’s naked body, they shuffle home afterward. Or maybe it’s the harrowing sight of Hanna Schygulla’s Tünde Eszter dancing with a drunk police chief (Péter Dobai) with a gun or the brilliantly lit entrance of a “circus” into town. But no, surely it must be one of the shots of the whale carcass which is its star attraction! My point, obviously, is that I loved it.
Werckmeister Harmonies played to an understandably small (given that it was 4pm on a weekday) crowd at the beautiful Waterville Opera House, a suitably grand venue for an undeniably great film. Afterward my loving wife snapped the following picture of me and Brian standing in front of the MIFF logo wall, which I believe is the first time I’ve ever utilized one of these things for its intended purpose:
What I perhaps appreciate most about film festivals is the opportunity they provide to identify connections between movies it may not otherwise have ever occurred to you to compare. So it is that I find myself thinking about Aurora’s Sunrise partly in terms of the film which preceded it. Arshaluys Mardigian endured unthinkable horrors during the Armenian genocide, but survived to play herself (under the name Aurora Mardiganian) in a silent film called Auction of Souls. Aurora’s Sunrise blends original (partially rotoscoped, as described by director Inna Sahakyan in this interview with Creative Armenia) animation, interviews with Mardigian shot on video in the 80s, and clips from the 20 minutes of surviving footage from Auction of Souls to tell Mardigian’s story. One of its most impactful moments comes at the end, when Mardigian suggests that the failure of the rest of the world’s governments to publicly condemn what happened in Armenia empowered the Nazis, which links the movie to Werckmeister Harmonies through the person of the old man mentioned above, who deliberately evokes the Holocaust. Another is the juxtaposition of a crucifixion scene from Auction of Souls that wouldn’t be out of place in a Cecil B. DeMille epic with an animated sequence which depicts in graphic detail the even more inhuman form of torture that Mardigian actually witnessed whereby Ottoman soldiers killed Armenian women after raping them by forcing them to sit on pointed stakes, impaling them through their vaginas. But lest I inadvertently make the film sound unrelentingly bleak, my favorite line is probably Mardigian’s wry response to arriving in St. Petersburg (then Petrograd) en route to America in the midst of the Russian Revolution: “after everything I’d seen, now this!?”
I also value festivals for the chance they provide to see films which for whatever reason probably *aren’t* coming soon to a theater near me. In the case of my final MIFF selection Bravo, Burkina! the problem is its runtime. At 64 minutes it isn’t quite a feature, but is also too long for most shorts programs; however, this made it the perfect length for the second half of an ad hoc double feature with Aurora’s Sunrise! The movie is a love story about two Burkinabe emigrants who meet first in Italy, then again in Burkina Faso after they separately return to their homeland. Each is played by multiple actors, and while this isn’t quite a “non-narrative film,” the plot is definitely of secondary importance to the sound and images. Where it is most successful is making two very different African and European locations look differently but equally beautiful. It also features spectacular costume design, which isn’t at all surprising considering that director Walé Oyéjidé is a fashion designer (he is the founder of Ikiré Jones) who worked on both Black Panther and Coming 2 America. Bravo, Burkina! would pair well with the thematically similar Past Lives and would be a perfect fit for the Criterion Channel’s “Afrofuturism” collection, which favors a big tent interpretation of that term.
All in all I had a wonderful experience at MIFF! I obviously never visited the Maine Film Center at its old Railroad Square Cinema location, but the Paul J. Schupf Art Center, which it moved to late last year, seems like a good home. Parking was easy to find, there are numerous nearby food and drink options, and the seats are maybe the most comfortable ones I’ve sat in all year. With family one town over in Fairfield, I think we’ll almost certainly be back, quite possibly sooner rather than later. I will be looking forward to it!
The Prodigal Cinephile 