Jérôme yaps about film

Of talking mushrooms, dancing excavators, slaughterhouses, underwater bombs and low-resolution images I recently had the chance to visit the Locarno Film Festival. Among the films I saw, there was a surprising amount that felt especially cryptic in hiding their meaning from the viewers. Meaning is often something very personal, very intimate, that is hard to talk about. As David Lynch once said: “It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.” But given that all of those films were from the two main competitions ( Internazionale and Cineasti del Presente ) and the discussions I had with friends, I felt the urge to meander a bit about what it means for me to understand a film. Linije želje, Dir:  Dane Komljen,  ©Dart Film It started relatively late into the festival when, against better ...

"Dry Leaf": Low-resolutions on the big screen ©Alexandre Koberidze, New Matter Films Irakli receives a letter from his daughter Lisa that she must go away for a while. Worried that something might have happened, he decides to go looking for her. The only thing known is that she was supposed to photograph rural football fields all over Georgia. Together with Lisa's friend Levan, Irakli sets off on a journey to seek out those fields and, in the process, find his daughter. For the rest of the three-hour runtime, we see the two driving around the country, through small villages, looking for the football fields, which often consist of nothing more than two goalposts made of some wood. Or rather, we don't see them. Because, as we learn early on through a narrator, Levan, like many other characters in the film, is invisible. Apart from that comment, this circumstance is never addressed but instead just accepted by everyone in the film. Thus, we, the viewers, also have to s...