ArtFilm Dispatch.

I'm just finished with serving on the jury at the ArtFilm festival in Trenčianske Teplice in Slovakia, where our jury gave the Blue Angel prize to Summer Book by the Turkish director Seyfi Teoman. You could call the film a coming of age story, a description that sells short almost anything it's applied to. Teoman's film is also the story of a boy learning of his father's death, in messages that are both tragic and trivial. He has an eye for the exquisite shot, as in the opening sequence of uniformed children swarming across a groups of rocks. Teoman also has a feel for what is precious in the most ordinary of surroundings.

Summer Book made its mark at other festivals before ArtFilm, but one of the other discoveries for me at the festival was Blind Loves [site], the new documentary by the Slovak filmmaker Juraj Lehotsky. Blindness has been anything but invisible on the screen recently, not least with the film Blindness, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. Lehotsky's meditative look at four blind subjects was also at Cannes, in the Directors' Fortnight. It's been the subject of a positive whispering campaign ever since, most recently in Karlovy Vary, where it screened last night.

This film could just as easily be called Un Certain Regard. Part of what Lehotsky seems to be doing is to test the notion that the blind, to the rest of us, are sort of like the rich. As the saying goes, they're just like us, except they have more money. So are the blind just like us, except that they can't see? Not really, according to Blind Loves. We're first introduced to a stable relationship between Peter, a music teacher with perfect pitch, who can run along the sidewalk and down a steep flight of stairs and his chubby wife. Peter is a dedicated teacher, but he is also committed to a serious fantasy life, wherein he imagines himself underwater as a deep sea explorer. Are his dreams visual? They are in this film, complete with the participation of Peter, who walks from a beach into the water - with a white cane - until he is completely submerged. Lehotsky animates the dreams with all sorts of marine life. What Peter "sees" in his own head is another issue.

In another story, we learn that love is not necessarily color-blind. Miro, a Roma man - there are hundreds of thousands of Roma (gypsies) in Slovakia - falls head over heels for a partially-sighted white girl, Monika. Her parents are not pleased with their daughter's choice, and concerns rise when she gets pregnant. Here, once again, Lehotsky is challenging our preconceptions of the blind. One tender scene explores how those with little or no sight "see" skin color. Monika tells him affectionately that he is getting as dark as a "briquette," while she is as white as flour. Soon we learn that culture, rather than color, makes the difference.

In another of Lehotsky's stories, Elena is expecting a baby and wondering how she will communicate with a child who can see. Is there a culture of the blind that she fears losing if her child can see? Elena even imagines how she would teach her child, if blind, the most basic of tasks, and give the child the head-start that Elena never had. Could having sight be a misfortune, for mother or child? I won't give the end away. 

We also meet Zuzana, a teenager who puts on her own makeup and who chats on the Internet with a boy like any other teenager. And when she talks to her friends about him, what does she talk about? His looks.

Lehotsky and his team, which includes producer Marko Skop, spent five years on Blind Loves. The film doesn't coddle or pity its subjects, nor does it mock them, despite plenty of opportunities for unintentional humor. The filmmakers' next project is a satrical doc about a depressed town in the corner where the borders of Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia meet. Politicians there decide to save the place by appealing to the European Community. Sounds like a new take on The Mouse That Roared.

Little Moth, from China, was another revelation, and not just because it cost all of $20,000 to make. Its heartbreakingly poignant story, performed deadpan by a non-professional cast, was adapted by the director from a novel by Tianguang Bai. It's not a vision of China that the Beijing government is likely to want foreigners to see just before the Olympics.  Yet it couldn't be more realistic, or more convincingly filmed.

The film's title comes from Xiao'e, the name of an expressionless girl of 11 (played by Huihui Zhao) who can't walk. She is bought through a petty hustler who knows her drunken father by Luo and Guiha, a couple who beg on the street. The professional pandhandlers figure that adding a sick "daughter" to their team, on the curb with her "mother," will add to the take. A doctor tells the "parents" that the girl has a serious disease and is in dire need of treatment. They claim not to have money, so he gives them some herbal medicine and a prescription that can be filled if they ever want to pay for it.

Soon money complicates things. Yes, even panhandlers can run short of cash, or fear that they might. Luo is so cheap that he won't allow Guiha to prepare the girl's medicine, but Guiha's motherly instincts win out. Local thugs then demand their cut from the street begging, and another con-man, Yang, who has a one-armed boy of 13 begging for him, joins the picture. Eventually Xiao'e and the young boy who befriends her flee - see the film to find out how - and they find that life on the streets for sick and disabled children is as grim as it looks. "Child beggars get restless when they reach the age of 13," Yang explains knowingly, as he heads to an orphanage to find a new boy.

Little Moth, shot in dusty grey street locations that are typical of the outskirts of any Chinese city these days, has an austerity which fits the story, but never seems to be cutting corners to save money. The tale has a deliberate rhythm, and cinematography by Yi Huang tracks the young girl's journey with a remarkable subtlety. Peng Tao's script is not an indictment of his government for letting such a girl fall into slavery - officials are absent from this film - yet his spare storytelling ensures that you understand why she is where she is. I won't give away the ending, except to note that the sick young girl eventually becomes too expensive for anyone to care for her.

There is something of a neo-realist look to Little Moth, thanks in part to the polluted atmosphere of its locations that mutes its colors into a monochrome. As in the neo-realist dramas, we know why these people are poor, so Peng Tao has no reason to be didactic. Think of the poverty of Naples in the late 1940s, but without the spectacle and the outbursts of emotion. The fatalism here, internalized by every character on the screen, hums along like a small efficient engine.

Director Peng Tao was in Trenčianske Teplice with his producer, Wenwen Zeng, a former corporate lawyer who is now his collaborator. The producer pointed out that, even though the actors in the principle roles were non-professionals, the doctors on screen lamenting the severity of Xiao'e's untreated illness were real doctors, who seemed to have seen it all before. "They know their profession," she said.

More on some other ArtFilm selections, and a lot more from Karlovy Vary as the week progresses.

Posted by dwhudson at July 7, 2008 5:30 AM