Bakal Boys – at Sthlm Film Festival

This is an extremely colorful sociorealistic drama about 15 young boys, none of them professional actors, who are diving for metal scraps in the dirty waters of the Manila harbor. The title also means ”Children metal divers”. The powerful colors doesn´t show completely in the movie trailer below, but are together with a beautiful soundtrack the main landmarks of this film. The story in itself about a missing friend to one of the boys is not the most important issue here, with the focus being more on the boys´hard life in general. However, the story is not bad either though a bit sad. The film is new from 2009, but has already been appreciated at several film festivals. The director is Ralston Jover, who also attended the cinema where the film was shown tonight.  I found this film very nice to watch, and especially interesting is that the children are not professional actors, and are yet acting so well, or perhaps they are mostly being themselves? I really would like to recommend this film and I will try to get a copy of the DVD as soon as it´s available on the market!

Go Get Some Rosemary- at Sthlm Film Festival

This film was the first one for me this year at the Stockholm Film Festival, and I therefore was a bit thrilled when I watched this yesterday in Stockholm. I usually go to this film festival every year and it´s everytime very fun to try choosing what films to see. It´s a bit tricky because you hardly know anything about the films and you have to pick the ones you want to see from a short description and usually with few or no screenshots to look at. However I was not disappointed with this first one. It´s an American film from 2009 dealing with the difficult subject of parenting as a single father. In the film you´ll follow Lenny, 34, who after the divorce has custody of his two kids for two weeks every year. The film starts when Lenny picks the two brothers Sage,9, and Frey,7, up from school and immediately starts an argument with the principal. Throughout the film we will realise that Lenny is not the perfect father, though actually acting very irresponsible and putting the kids in dangerous situations several times. The story is very authentic and well balanced with the acting performances, which were generally excellent. Lenny is so well played that I still get upset when I see a screenshot of him. The two brothes are also excellent performers. The camera work is the ”shaky handy camera”-type, at first you get a bit car-sick, but after a while you adjust and this technique makes a film more realistic sometimes.  The colors are delibaretaly (?) not very strong, reflecting the socioeconomic environment in which the story takes place. I liked this film very much and can recommend it!

Lenny : Ronald Bronstein

Sage : Sage Ranaldo

Frey : Frey Ranaldo

 

New reviews and changes

There will soon be some new reviews, and there will also be some changes in the structure of this coming-of-age movie blog. The films will be categorized mainly from what region they come from, so there will be an Asian section, a French section, and so on, and all with different layouts, but reachable from this main blog site. Within each section there will be more categories to make the films more easily searched for.

Pegij Pyos Begushchij Krayem Morya

The first hour of the film is made like a documentary of rural life in an Eskimo-like community on the northern Siberian coast. The other part of the film is a slowly progressive drama about a boy, his father and two other men going out for a boat trip to hunt some seals on a remote island off the coast. They are travelling in a handmade wooden boat, with only the sky to navigate from. After a successful hunting they head back for the village. However they are surprised by bad weather and are swept into a heavy fog that will last for days. With nothing to eat and the water supply running out, the men are starting to sacrifice themselves one by one for the little boy. This is a slow film, with almost no dialogue, but this is a unique piece of authentic social anthropology. Of course it is also a nice coming of age portrait about the boy. The film was made in 1990, an the director is Karen Gevorkian.

        

Next reviews

My next review will be of the Russian film ”Pegij Pyos Begushchij Krayem Morya”, a slow yet intense film about a boy living in Siberia. There will also be a review of ”The sandlot”, a film about some young boys having fun in the neighborhood. The review of the Russian film had not been possible without the support from cvmc.net. Check it out!