Writers and Directors: Li Yue, Aliosha Massine, Marek Leszczewski and Suman Sen
Raindance is the biggest and best independent film festival in the UK, and is especially nurturing of shorts. This year all Raindance’s short films can be watched via Curzon Home Cinema. However, some have made it to the big screen too, and the selection in Remarkable Encounters showcases writer-directors with painterly visions.
The best of the four encounters is Poland’s The Dreams of Lonely People directed by Marek Leszczewski. Each scene in this desolate story about love and loss has the quality of an oli canvas, from its opening shot of a car driving through dawn mist to its final image of rain falling. A man (Adam Szyszkowski) has come home from prison, but his house is deserted apart from a wandering woman who pushes a pram full of paint. Both say little to each other, but an attraction grows nevertheless, perhaps born out by the fact that they are the only two people in the landscape. The camera finds them walking in dusk, where their silhouettes are sharp and animated or in bed, where she (Anna Paglia) looks like a black-eyed medieval saint.
When the man receives good news, it seems that he must lose her. In an extraordinary scene she returns to the country and communes with nature. Paglia has called it an act of purification, but it could also be a sign of madness or divinity. Knowing that part of it is CGI-produced doesn’t diminish its power, and Tomasz Mreńca’s music soars in support.
Almost as stunning is A Lucid Dream from China’s Li Yue, but here the shots are more obviously constructed, designed with a vibrant palette. The story is impenetrable and is set in the 1990s when China was beginning to open up to the rest of the world. Pop songs from Hong Kong play in a truck belonging to a young couple driving to a lake popular for its swimming. Meanwhile a worker in a timber yard announces that he has seen blue wood.
More than narrative, Li Yue is interested in colour and her choice is evident in every detail. The couple wear yellow clothes as they walk through the lush green landscape. Draped over his shoulder are his blue boxers shorts, purely there, it seems, to lend another hue to her paint box.
Aliosha Massine also uses a good deal of blue in Holy Son, a modern day take on the Bible’s annunciation story. A woman, dressed in an aquamarine dressing gown surrounded by Prussian blue crockery, tells her male partner that she has had a dream in which a god-like figure told her that she would have a baby. As he battles to believe that he will become a 21st century Joseph, the partner agrees to go the local chemist to buy a pregnancy test. When he returns, a handsome neighbour is making his girlfriend a cup of tea. Massine’s shaggy dog story is well told but perhaps actor Luca Massaro is given too much to do.
Completing the quartet of films is The Silent Echo by Suman Sen about four wannabe rock stars living in the mountains of Nepal. The four children play in a burnt out mini-bus stranded atop of a viewing spot that no one visits anymore. Using what’s left of the bus as percussion, the children sing songs about life in the mountains. One day they hear about a X-factor style competition in the nearby town; they pool their resources to pay for the bus fares there and back. The sparse storytelling – there is little dialogue – complements the sparse landscape of grey mountains and melting snow. And yet, Sen celebrates the mountain life too, and it is authentic and solid when compared to the gaudy banalities of town.
While A Lucid Dream and The Silent Echo are competing for Best Short of the Festival, you can only hope that all four writer-directors will one day get the chance to make a feature. Their vision demands it.
Remarkable Encounters is screening as part of the Raindance Film Festival 2021 and via Curzon Home Cinema until 6 November 2021.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Visionary
