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RIFFA Day 4: Narrative Features, International and LGBTQ Shorts

Eva Löbau's Alice anxiously awaits an interview in The Chairs Game
       The great bragging rights of attending a film festival is getting to see movies, sometimes great movies, before the rest of the world. I know I’m envious of the lucky folks at Cannes who have already seen Bong Joon-ho’s Parasites, Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse. And on the fourth day of RIFFA I felt at least a sampling of that kind of privilege. At last I got to see a couple narrative features from little-known international directors that probably won’t ultimately be seen by a substantial audience. And that is a great shame. Rafiki was such a film, which I saw earlier this year, and is still one of my favourites. But the least I can do is tell people about these movies.
Crush My Heart is an interesting one. An Austrian movie about a Romeo & Juliet kind of romance that forms between two teenagers trapped in the grips of a Romani mob. It’s the feature debut of writer-director Alexandra Makarová, who cuts it into four parts following the evolution of the relationship between Pepe (Roman Pokuta) and Marcela (Simona Kovácová), leant to Pepe’s vile uncle Rocky (Frantisek Balog) in fulfilment of her fathers’ debt. The film is quite harsh by implication, often miserable due to the circumstances depicted and its plot is relatively formulaic. Through the shifting tones of heightened romance and pessimism though, the movie is carried by a magnetic performance from Kovácová and a monstrously lecherous one from Balog.
However the prize for best performance of the day from an actor I'd never heard of goes to Eva Löbau in The Chairs Game, another feature debut from Lucia Chiarla based on her own short film. It's a film about a lethargic freelancer called Alice in Berlin who's having trouble making ends meet as she struggles with depression and her finances, resulting in her going to some very irresponsible places and taking extreme measures to stay afloat. As farcical as the movie often is, the sadness of Alice's predicament and mental illness is pervasive, you feel immense empathy in spite of her rabbit hole of lies and procrastination. It's a truly marvellous performance from Löbau, one of my favourites of the year, and Chiarla directs with apt visual and narrative prowess (she really knows how to use blank space to create an atmosphere of emptiness) and admirable humanity. Easily, one of the festival's best.
After two features I decided to check out a series of international short films: Fatimah, a Jordanian documentary of a young girl's life in a Syrian refugee camp (the ubiquity of flies was particularly striking); 2nd Class, a Swedish film wherein a teacher educates the son of a Nazi who attacked her on the importance of love; Line of Duty, an Indian examination of the hate and paranoia that fuels war; and Touttay, an experimental Indian film about freedom of thought, juxtaposing the performance art of a banned poem about Gandhi with the creation and realization of such an adaptation. I was unimpressed that a lot of my audience walked out of this film, presumably due to its unconventional nature -or perhaps its length at a towering fifty minutes. I found it to be quite interesting.
At the end of the night, I made a point to check out the group screening of LGBTQ themed shorts. The Estonian Tomorrow Island, about a Soviet agent attempting to escort her lover across the Bering Strait was very good until its annoyingly clichéd and disappointing ending. Much better was a Dutch film Dante vs. Mohammad Ali about the romance that develops between two boxing opponents in the Dutch countryside. Jack and Anna, an American film based on a true story, touches on lesbian and trans themes as it depicts the discovery in 1913 of a relationship between two women, one of whom has been secretly living as a man. And lastly, fed up with so many queer stories ending in tragedy, If You Dare Desire... takes the Tarantino approach of rewriting the real suicide of two Indian girls, allowing them to circumvent the circumstances of their deaths whilst focusing on their difficult yet tender relationship. There's an ethical debate to be had here, but for what it's worth the depiction of the girls is heartfelt and respectful, both actresses are great, and the film expresses a strong assertiveness not common enough in LGBTQ oriented media.
And thus it's with a heavy heart that I come to the end of the film screenings of RIFFA. In four days I've seen twenty-nine movies from across ten countries and sat for panels and a master class. What a week! Tomorrow I will beguile with the close of the festival, the Red Carpet and Awards show at Casino Regina.

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