Today I saw two Love and Anarchy films, and they were both seriously weird. It's great when you walk out of the movie theater into the street and for a while just forget all about the ugliness of society around you, your mind processing all that audiovisual information you were just blasted with. I love this festival.

La bête (The beast)

I don't know what to think of this film. There was a lot of trying to figure out what exactly is happening, and more importantly when. As if in a dream, the film jumped (or did it?) between time, connecting two people, Gabrielle and Louis, wrapping them in a deep love story over space and time. In constant fear of tragedy just around the corner, never quite becoming the love story that you are constantly waiting to happen.

Beautiful filming, great screenplay and lots of mind warping jumps in the story, including some jump scares to keep the audience from getting too comfortable.

Infinite summer

Filmed in beautiful Estonia the film follows two teenagers as they spend their summer holiday at a cottage, catching up on their friendship and the challenges growing up causes. Feeling a loss of connection one of them connects to "Doctor Mindfulness", through an enhanced reality dating app. What they get is not quite what the scruffy mind expanding doctor promised.

There are several layers to this film, and I'm happy I stuck around for the director Q&A to get those clarified. On the one hand we have a teenager growth story, on the other hand we have a scare story of technology going horribly wrong. Or are things going wrong? Or is this a growth story of humanity as well, transcending into something else. Maybe not better, maybe not worse, but different. We are not told, and there probably is no answer.

#hiff #films #scifi #weird

There are no comments yet.