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A Word from our Selectors: Panorama

I’ve frequently been asked what are the selection criteria, or the common denominators, of Panorama films. Hmmm. Well, they are not experimental, neither are they typical of the interchangeable movies showing at a mall near you; they lie somewhere in between. (I’m a strong believer in not only honoring the best movies, but also in respecting the audience by taking them away from the usual, lifting them out of complacence, talking up to, rather than down at, them.)

As many of you know, the conventions of narrative cinema are arbitrary, having been adopted and refined within 20 years of the first film projection in 1895. Shot/reverse-shot, the eyeline match, the establishing shot: None is absolute. By the time he made BIRTH OF A NATION in 1915, American director D.W. Griffith had so refined these coded techniques that no one, except avant-gardists, attempted to convey a film narrative any other way.

The filmmakers whose works end up in Panorama do operate mostly with that cinematic grammar. What distinguishes them, however, is how they juggle traditional film language so that something novel emerges. Their canvas lies in the twilight zone between what we are used to and what is beyond our expectations. Playing with form necessarily means reassessing content. Perhaps this is what makes these artists auteurs, at least according to the half-century-old auteur theory: They place a personal stamp on material that is in many ways retreaded. Hey, how else would they get financing?

The Panorama selections put a new twist on that cinematic staple, the genre film, the pop-culture manifestation of conventional storytelling. Several are road movies, but hardly typical of that well-worn genre. Russian director Vladimir Kott’s MUKHA/THE FLY, the opening night film, is about a trucker torn between his freewheeling life and the more sedentary provincial one he would lead should he take care of the daughter he hadn’t known about. Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi’s LAILA’S BIRTHDAY is the study of an ex-judge in Ramallah who experiences these horrid times while driving through the city in his taxi. Also taking place largely inside a car, GOODBYE SOLO, by Ramin Bahrani, from the U.S., tells of an old man bent on suicide and the younger immigrant driver from Africa he hires who tries to prevent the action. Even significant sections of Marat Sarulu’s Kazakh film SONGS FROM THE SOUTHERN SEAS bear the trademarks of the road movie, especially the protagonist’s motorcycle trip through the countryside when things get difficult, and, on a larger scale, the peripatetic history of both ethnic Kazakh and Russian newcomers.

And unusual spins on the most popular genre of all, the love story. In Sion Sono’s LOVE EXPOSURE, from Japan, the young protagonist is as over-the-top in love with the girl of his religious vision as the movie is in its campy conception. Swiss director Lionel Baier’s ANOTHER MAN updates, and subverts, the Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedies when a poseur film critic becomes obsessed with the real thing, an intellectual bitch who condescends to and outwits him. In Danish adulte terrible Lars von Trier’s ANTICHRIST, an intensely sexual married couple veers into the realm of nearly unwatchable sadism and hysteria after the death of their child Russian director Olga Popova’s short IN THE THEME explores the dynamics of the relationship between two lesbians, people who are rarely put on-screen in three-dimensional fashion.

We have psychological horror films that turn the genre on its head. In FEAR ME NOT, by Danish director Kristian Levring, the great actor Ulrich Thomsen plays a wealthy, civilized man who allows his inner demons to surface to the point that he tortures his wife and daughter. Russian filmmaker Alexei Balabanov’s period piece, MORPHINE, observes the descent of a country medical doctor and his nurse into the aberrant world inhabited by heavy-duty drug addicts. In Enrique Rivero’s Mexican movie, PARQUE VIA, a lower-class guard afraid of the outside world is driven to a gruesome act when he fears displacement. The coercion by kidnappers of an incestuous act between siblings precipitates the slow mental meltdown of a teen, peaking in the grotesque abuse of his beloved sister, in another Mexican film, Michel Franco’s DANIEL & ANA. Kazakh filmmaker Guka Omarova’s NATIVE DANCER, in which the world of the spirits affects the more earthbound among us, is the tale of a healer and the punishment she bestows upon the vulgarian mercenaries who interfere with her life and the lives of those around her.

Not to mention the prison dramas, such as Japanese director Hajime Kadoi’s VACATION, in which a death-row guard must choose between friendship with a condemned man and a week off for a honeymoon. BRONSON, by Nicolas Winding Refn (yet another Dane), is the story of the U.K.’s longest serving prisoner, a boxer whose violent tendencies can barely be contained. If I can stretch things a bit, I consider two other films, not set in an institutional setting, as quasi-prison dramas: Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva’s THE MAID, about a servant from the provinces almost incarcerated in the luxurious home of the wealthy urban family with whom she lives; and American director Bob Giraldi’s short SECOND GUESSING GRANDMA, about a young gay man trying to emerge from the closet in the 1980s.

And that, my friends and loyal viewers, is the kernel that begins to define Panorama.

Howard Feinstein, programmer

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