Whether it is used as a metaphor for society or as a basis to analyse human relationships, the family is one of the main themes in literature, theatre and cinema. The release in France on October 29 of Home by Ursula Meier -the film premiered at Cannes Film Festival this year at International Critics’ Week and has just been screened at London Film Festival last week- is a chance to look back on the family and its relationship with the rest of the world.

A family lives in an isolated house by the side of a highway that was never finished and never opened. They’re all different -each one at his place-, they form an harmonious whole, a family. When the highway his announced to open soon, their world falls apart. It was a playground yesterday, the road his now a dangerous area. Then the noise starts to fill up the space, until it fills it all. Slowly, like an insidious evil, the exterior world begins to interfere with the harmony of the family life. The response to this otherness that was kept away so far will be collective, familial, but also individual. And while it disrupts the relationship of the family to the rest of the world, it will also change the family microcosm.

The confrontation of a family with an external element that changes the familial order was also the theme of Pasolini’s Theorem and its Japanese trash version, Visitor Q by Takashi Miike, the external element in these movies being a character that reveals to the members of the family a part of their personality ignored so far. It was also a little white mouse that made the family depicted by French director François Ozon in his first film Sitcom explode. Behind those films, like in Home by Ursula Meier, stands the idea that the family exists as an entity as long as everyone of its members plays his part. Modifying people in the family cell weakens -and may even destroy- the balance that keeps the family as a whole. The external elements act as catalysts for the characters neurosis, and while revealing to themselves an asleep part of their personalities, they change their relationship to the family entity. It’s also as a unit that the family incarnated a whole social class in films like The Damned by Luchino Visconti or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Vittorio De Sica. By representing a social microcosm by itself, the family enables the illustration of its nuances through the family members. It finally is the common point of all the films: family is a structured micro-society and it can only rely to the rest of the world through conflict. This idea was of course explicitly used in mafia flicks in films like The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola or Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese. The family, whether real or symbolic, has its own order, its own laws and rules, and its confrontation with the rest of society can only be a struggle.

Home is a film about a happy family, a family that has found a balance –between its members and in its relationship with the rest of the world, which was carefully kept away. The opening of the sleeping highway will act as a developer of all the problems that were muted so far. And if its effect will brand the characters, no doubt the family will eventually grow stronger. French-Swiss director Ursula Meier, who writes and directs here her first 35 mm feature film, offers a rich vision of the family unit and a powerful work, a true declaration of faith in the power of cinema and its ways of expression, through the work on the frame, the editing, the cinematography, the sound. An author you should definitely keep an eye on.

Francis Chérasse

HOME by Ursula Meier - 2008 - Switzerland, France, Belgium - Written by Ursula Meier, Antoine Jaccoud, Raphaëlle Valbrune, Gilles Taurand - Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaïde Leroux.

Watch out next week our interview with Ursula Meier!

In the meantime, check out the French trailer:

Very occasionally, there are films that give the impression of having found an exact equivalence between their subject and their form, thus attaining a state of “grace”. It may seem strange to apply this word to A côté (Next Door), which is set in a hostel for families visiting a relative in the Rennes penitentiary. And yet Stéphane Mercurio’s documentary performs this miracle. By filming for almost a year the wives, mothers and less often, the fathers, who stopover in this halfway house between the outside and the visiting room, she confronts us with the violence and arbitrary nature of the prison system. We see a woman who discovers her son has been transferred to Brest and she will have to take the train when she has four other children and little money. We see parents who are told their child is not there and who visit every hospital in town, finding him, without being able to see him following a transfer for attempted suicide. We see a series of major and minor annoyances: a visit cancelled because the machine that distributes tickets is not working or a book that couldn’t be given. As a counterpoint to this sober and poignant documentary are magnificent photographs by Grégoire Korsakow - the only references to the outside world - that capture the main characters in court, at home or by the sea. These intimate images are another way of describing the loneliness and waiting as time stands still.
As the film moves forward, the prison that we never see as anything other than a wall at the end of a garden, becomes omnipresent, omnipotent. We come out feeling stunned by the violence and impressed by the dignity, love and courage of each of these women trying to hold it together, whatever the cost. And who sometimes collapse. Great cinema.

Emmanuelle Mougne

Read the interview with Stéphane Mercurio.

At first, we wonder what’s got into 24 year old Antonio Campos, director (as well as scriptwriter and editor) of this brilliant first film with its images of video gags and trashy porn bathed in the darkness of Scope, quirky framing, still shots of feet, etc. This focus on the formal, that looks at first like youthful folly, soon gains in substance. These images that seem “badly made” paradoxically reveal the presence of a real filmmaker. The question is who is he and why is he filming.

Let’s start at the beginning. In an upper class American boarding school, Robert, a stubborn, sex obsessed, teen loner masturbates in front of porn videos in his room while his buddy Dave deals cocaine. Elsewhere, students line up in a long corridor where they are given medication. At the canteen, one says, “You know, I fucked your sister,” “That’s coke whores for you.” says another, the way you’d say, “Pass the salt.” Meanwhile the school principal regularly reminds everyone of the school’s gentle ethics in a setting that looks like a chapel with a flag.
Then suddenly death rears its ugly head. The Thalbert sisters, pretty young twins who are the school’s muses, overdose in front of Robert’s camera. He is there by accident, fascinated, shocked or stunned - it is hard to say.
Up until then, there’s nothing new under the sun in this teen chronicle of the unease of the wealthy. Except that what interests Antonio Campos are the images.
These are the film’s real heroes; enigmatic, omnipresent and disturbing. They are pumped out by YouTube, picked up by cell phones, recorded by Robert for his video workshop or forbidden by the institution to save its reputation and its wealthy clients.
The director uses many sources and presents banal or terrible images on the same level. He seeks out reality but is aware it always slips away from him. Yet the film that Robert makes at the school’s request about the Thalbert sisters, with its flaws, its silences and the parents who suddenly have nothing to say, seems more ”true” than the empty, reedited film that ends up being shown to the school assembly with its endless repetition of “I will miss you,” over grandiloquent music.
If there is trauma it is in this camouflage; the gentle, muffled hushing-up, that like the medication handed out to the students is supposed to prevent anyone getting upset.
The images, like urges, keep coming. And Antonio Campos, like his stubborn hero, keeps following them, like an attentive and disturbing entomologist.

Emmanuelle Mougne

If you have never seen any Guy Maddin film and are a film addict looking for new cinematographic experiences, or else if you are just open-minded enough to pass over dominant schemes, take your chance! Prepare – or rather do not prepare –, rush to see Guy Maddin’s latest film: Brand Upon the Brain! The discovery will be even more striking, refreshing and, above all, dazing. Experimental in its form, yet not elitist, Brand Upon the Brain! is built as a “remembrance in 12 chapters” and drags you down to a fantastic tale where images in Super 8, expressionist black and white, colours strokes, falsely subliminal intertitles, aerophonic sounds, Jason Staczek’s music and Isabella Rossellini’s voice take you to the guts, quite literally. Because Brand Upon the Brain!, is also a genre movie (in the many senses of the term): myths and mythology melt in a maelstrom of secrets, obsessions, desires, primal fears and strange holes hidden deep into the memory of a character named Guy, first as a man then as a child. An hypnotic trip derived from psychoanalysis and poetry.
Financed by The Film Company, an independent American film studio, which supports authors and lets them free to run their projects, Brand Upon the Brain! proves, in a new context for Guy Maddin but in a quasi-synthetic way, the stupefying vitality of a work like no other.
If Maddin’s aficionados (Careful, Archangel, Tales of the Gimli Hospital, Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World) will be satisfied to identify the organic and visual touch of the on the margins filmmaker, newcomers will enjoy this cinematographic food without any conservatives where senses are filled with wonder. An unforgettable mystical trip to a forever lost past: the one of an awakening childhood.

Read Guy Maddin’s interview and watch the trailer now!

Synopis: Whatever are young “Guy Maddin’s” parents really up to in their lighthouse home/orphanage on a chilly remote island? Overbearing Mother tracks her son’s every move, bellowing for him to come home over the “Aerophone” just as something interesting is about to happen! And poor Sis, his older sister (who is rapidly blossoming into a young woman)–Mother will never let her have any fun! The intrigue continues as deranged Mother, hellbent on restoring her youth and sinister Scientist-Father who is sequestered night and day in his basement laboratory, engage in diabolical, secret experimentation. When new parents of recently adopted children from the orphanage notice strange wounds on the youngsters’ necks, a pair of teen sleuths, Wendy and her brother Chance, known as “The Lightbulb Kids,” appear on the island to investigate–and in the process, inspire Guy’s first crush and Sis’ first love affair. The lurid family secrets that unfold are positively shocking.

Françoise Duru

More details about Guy Maddin’s films:
Archangel
Careful
Dracula
Cowards Bend the Knee
The Saddest Music in the World

In a stroke of well-orchestrated timing, given that September happens to be when school goes back, this month sees the DVD and theater release of La loi du collège (School Law), by Mariana Otero (in stores on the 16th) and the Golden Palm at the last Cannes Film Festival, Entre les murs (The Class), by Laurent Cantet (released on the 24th in France).

The first pioneered a new genre, the documentary series, in relating in six episodes the 1993 school year at the Garcia Lorca Junior High School in St Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
The second is fiction that takes a school as its setting. For his fourth feature film (after Human Resources, Time Out and Heading South), Laurent Cantet has adapted the book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, which described a French teacher’s year at a junior high in the north east of Paris.

Two “classroom movies”
“Classroom movies” are practically a genre in their own right. Among those that spring to mind, there are comedies (Les Sous Doués (The Under-gifted) by Zidi, Kindergarten Cop by Reitman: the classroom as a backdrop for fooling around), and tragedies (school as the first of oppressive institutions – Young Torless by Schlondorff, If by Lindsay Anderson, etc.). In the second case, sometimes a teacher who is “not like the others” lets in a breeze of freedom (a romantic version as in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or libertarian style as in Seeking Asylum by Marco Ferreri). Sometimes, too, things are reversed and the violence of the outside world bursts in (Blackboard Jungle by Richard Brooks back in 1955, Class 84 by Mark Lester, It All Starts Today by Tavernier or in a completely different style, Elephant by Gus Van Sant…).
Logically, this fertile playground most often attracts filmmakers interested in political and social issues or groups (Ferreri, Kiarostami, Philibert, Tavernier, Wiseman…).
Mariana Otero and Laurent Cantet undeniably belong here. But School Law and The Class do not fit into these categories. Heirs of a complex world in which “big causes” have disappeared, these two films make do with presenting characters grappling with the complexity of their situation. Both of them see school as a watching ground for “human chaos”. Mariana Otero says she did not want to make a film about learning, but about the law: how it is laid down, negotiated and practiced. Cantet’s film is in the same style. What matters here is language. He looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense. For both filmmakers, school is where people confront one another, size each other up, show respect and try to get along. These films are “team players” (The Class ends with a game of soccer between teachers and students), which doesn’t stand in the way of a few close-ups on certain characters. It’s not easy for a film to give equal airtime all the way.

A similar structure: the issue of time and space
To render this confrontation, the two of them chose to be both radical and modest. Both opted for the same “time and space”: a school year and the closed environment of a junior high school.
Classroom, staff room, corridors, yard and school principal’s office: it all happens here, in a life governed by bells (which sound strangely like an alarm at Garcia Lorca Junior High). Inside this space, there is a lot of noise and cameras are on full alert – 3 cameras for Laurent Cantet’s film and the flexibility of a small crew for Mariana Otero. They share an objective: revealing classroom drama by taking their time. One was filmed over a period of a whole year. The other was constructed around (separate) workshops for students and teachers.
By keeping off-screen the private lives of both teachers and students, psychology and overly obvious determinism is avoided. This was particularly risky for the fiction because the film gives little opportunity to identify with the characters, preferring to explore situations of interaction rather than inner worlds.

Fiction / Documentary
In Laurent Cantet’s film, we leave the school grounds only once: at the start of the film, François Marin has a coffee at the bar of a café, then enters the school with two colleagues. The same is true in Mariana Otero’s documentary: a group of teachers, tired of strikes that don’t get anywhere, decide, as a last resort, to visit the School Inspectorate.
The out-of-school scene in The Class is individual. In School Law it is collective. This difference indicates contrasting approaches. For the sake of efficiency, Cantet focuses on the individual, structuring the film around attentive close-ups on faces. During the film, a story emerges. The teacher veers onto slippery ground. Drama slowly builds. The film ends with the expulsion of a student. For Otero, the camera is hand-held. She films the yard and the meetings. There are more people per shot. She takes in the “whole” school.
Paradoxically, the strength of each film lies in its ability to take on the characteristics of the “other” genre. In School Law characters disappear or reappear depending on events. Stories follow on from one another, which makes relevant the use of the series. On the contrary, in The Class, the actor-students and Bégaudeau, who plays the role of the teacher himself, contribute extra reality to the fiction.

Similar intentions
It is no accident that the classrooms chosen were in junior highs with a reputation for being difficult. In junior highs, the whole process of social sorting has not yet taken place. And in so-called tough neighborhoods, the issue of “getting along” is even more urgent.
These films use school to reflect their era, assuming that the outside will invite itself in – starting with the issue of identity and origins. As Khoumba and Esmeralda say to their teacher François Marin, why use the name Bill in an example, rather than Aïssata?
Furthermore, both of them incidentally raise the fundamental (and unresolved) question of what school can pass down today and reveal a world grappling with a possible breakdown in meaning.
We hear over and over, “You move, you run, you shout, you fly, why do you come to school?” looping a teacher’s sentence like a nursery rhyme in the credits of School Law. Fifteen years later, Henriette echoes her in The Class by saying to her teacher at the end of the year, “I didn’t learn anything this year. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
Through François Marin and the staff at Garcia Lorca Junior High neither of these two films gives an answer but they both give the question a real workout.

Emmanuelle Mougne.

More details about School Law available now on DVD and VOD.
Also check out the film blog including free videos.

Scampia is a suburb to the north of Naples, and a crossroads for global drug trafficking. Gomorra follows the lives of a dozen characters involved in the activities of the Camorra at different levels, all bound by the economic system of the most important criminal organisation in Europe.

With their disappointed and broken hopes and destinies, the characters in Gomorra are subject to a law that, although it is not overt, governs the lives of the people who live in the suburbs of Naples. The Camorra takes charge of its members from an early age, after a rite of passage that is as brutal as it is symbolic, and accompanies them after retirement with a pension scheme. Trafficking in drugs of all kinds, control of the rag trade, both legal and otherwise, the “management” of waste – we are spared nothing of the organisation’s activities, and the film, adapted from the bestseller by Roberto Saviano describing the organisation’s activities in Naples which earned its author a death sentence from the underworld, relies on its documentary skill. The director’s desire to address the subject comprehensively is palpable, as he uses the experiences of the individual characters to relate the tangible reality of everyday life in this suburb to the north of Naples. What interests the director is the everyday lives of ordinary people and the direct effects of the Camorra’s activities on the population of Scampia. But –and this is really one of the strong points of this remarkable film– the functioning of the Camorra in Naples never takes precedence over the dramaturgical aspect or the awesomely effective directing.
Gomorra is not only a brilliant documentary study – it is also a truly great genre film. Indeed by concentrating too much on the informative aspect of the film there is a risk of overlooking what makes it a great film. The filming and the photography are brilliant, staying close to the characters, sometimes seeing the world through their eyes, sometimes merely following them, but always there, with dynamic, inspired directing. Breathing palpable life into the characters, the director avoids the pitfall of turning them into major representative stereotyped figures and, beyond the documentary aspect, he makes us experience and feel with them the pregnant presence of the Camorra and the influence it exerts on everyone’s lives, whether they like it or not. At no time does the director use the mythology and iconography typical of the Mafia film. There is no indulgence in describing the underworld, or in the way of handling the other aspect of this ordinary war –violence– which is dry and cold, harsh and summary. In a word – ordinary.

One of the films in the official selection at the last Cannes Festival, where it received the Grand Prix, Gomorra is an exciting lesson in the cinema and proof of the rediscovered vitality of European cinema which, in Italy, Spain and Germany, is once more producing films for the general public that are both intelligent and technically brilliant.

Olivier Gonord

Opening a new chapter of his “true-false” autobiography (it is in fact fiction based on reality and riddled with excerpts from vignettes of his real life), Joseph Morder recounts the story of one Spring he shared with his plants, his cats and his friend Sacha, but also with Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy, and of course with us, the audience, complicit readers of his diary.

Clearly privileging innocence and fun, Morder offers a variety of short poetic moments as sketches, where objects and pets are graced with beauty and humanized in a mere instant: a conversation with a kitten, the intimate “rise and shine” of flowers on his terrace, shots of Paris streets, … Everyday elements are transformed and magnified with a skillful, focused approach, despite the unusual format of this odd camera.
This peculiar approach to the visual image is worth seeing, with a wavy motion across the screen and the raw and unstable contrast in the lighting, more white than it is luminous. Morder’s cell-phone camera creates a barrier between the eye and the world: the latter appears slightly distant, odd and sometimes incomprehensible. The filmmaker sets up this universe using a public event: the 2007 French presidential elections and the “Royal vs. Sarkozy” duel. Television becomes the arena for the fate of the People who, mesmerized by this exceptional media combat, also become a visual and media monster.
But Morder pleads innocent and highlights above all his attempt at creating a modest and amusing simplicity. As he himself claims: he is in the worst position to talk about his own work. It would thus be useless to interpret, or over-interpret, his film. Suffice it to say that Morder is a true poet who strives for image before meaning, and beauty before esthetics. His film is a rare testimony to poetic “snapshots,” is often funny, and always clever.

Alexandre Péron

Jean-Pierre Limosin’s work is still in progress. Each new film seems to be a conscious continuation of some previous research: to do that he always needs to jump from fiction to documentary and from one subject to another. That’s how Limosin overcame a period of doubt following his first three films, Subterfuge (co-directed with Alain Bergala in 1983), Guardians of the Night (1986) and The Other Night (1988), working on documentary with portraits of Abbas Kiarostami and Alain Cavalier for the French TV serial Cinéma, de notre temps, in order to come back to fiction with Tokyo Eyes in 1996, shot in Japanese with young local stars and a special guest, Takeshi Kitano –who will also have his portrait filmed in the same French TV serial one year later. Those are two films it’s impossible not to think about when watching Young Yakuza, Limosin’s new Japanese documentary he shot in Shinagawa neighborhood within the clan of M. Kumagai, a yakuza boss whose face first may frighten without its anxious words.
Between Tokyo Eyes and Young Yakuza, Limosin made Novo -a fiction of desire and amnesia with Anna Mouglalis in 2002- among others projects. For the DVD special features, Limosin went back to Japan to film Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki: on this occasion M. Kumagai first met him with the idea of filming his clan. As a documentary is often the place for a power struggle, Limosin didn’t brought this Godfather fan the film he expected, but on the contrary a very sharp description of a circle. The “young yakuza” is not him but Naoki, a recruit who doesn’t support the implacable ceremonial for a very long time and end up disappearing without further notice: a charismatic boy, whom softness and adaptability is strong enough to oppose the ancestrals yet shiny rituals of the mob. Naoki is not less charismatic than Tokyo Eyes hero. Later, Kumagai fell off his position due to the internecines infightings Limosin told us in his interview: the film foreshadows this fall by depicting the outside pressure on the clan more than the inverted movement -traditional in mob films from Hawks’ Scarface to Scorsese’s Goodfellas. That’s what makes Young Yakuza a precious film about Japan’s relation to its “mob” -a documentary fascinated by its subject without the need for Limosin to assist one way or another to the crimes it continues to perpetrate.

Bastien Hader

Not a household name to the general public, but a regular fixture in major international festivals, Garin Nugroho is an important voice in Indonesia. Born to a family of artists (his father is a writer, publisher and stage director, and his brother’s works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale), Nugroho, who studied both law and film, imagined cinema for a long time through history books, since foreign films were banned under Suharto’s dictatorship. Initially an attorney-turned-film critic who then directed ads, music videos and documentaries before becoming a filmmaker and a professor, Nugroho is as much a politically involved citizen as he is a learned scholar, and, as an artist, is extremely aware of society’s barriers and the creativity of others.

Opera Jawa, his second to last film to date, received financing from Austria, since – along with Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, Ming-liang Tsai’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt – it was one of seven films commissioned for the New Crowned Hope Project to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, presided over by Peter Sellars. The high-quality programming was an excellent showcase for Nugroho’s talent: Opera Jawa is an astonishing film, which combines contemporary and traditional arts, the founding myths of Asia and its political, ecological, social and economic realities of today. The point of departure for the film is the Ramayana, an Indian book whose influence has spread throughout the whole of Southeast Asia and which recounts in episodic form the abduction of Sita by a demon, and her being won back by her husband, the prince Rama. Nugroho has changed the names, Sita and Rama have become potters and the demon is transformed into a powerful butcher who ravishes his victim by seducing her through predatory dances and extravagant conduct. Into this conflict between marriage and desire can be read a statement on contemporary life, with a struggle between fundamentalist religions; and humankind’s victimization by Nature’s contempt may be seen as an echo to the tsunami that shook the region down to its cultural foundations. Nugroho does not shy away from accumulating possible interpretations, which for him are the wealth of the fable’s simplicity.

Although at first sight the viewer may feel he or she has been plunged into a totally unknown and foreign universe, Opera Jawa is still a resolutely contemporary film. The director’s mixture of oral, physical, dramatic and musical expression, his synthesis of multiple art forms, and the equivalent importance he gives to legend and reality, with references to local traditions and world culture, may be profoundly confusing. However, once moviegoers get past this disoriented feeling, they can re-open their eyes to a totally new world, where particles from ancient times mingle in a disconcerting yet euphoric atmosphere.

Bastien Hader

40 year-old alcoholic Julia kidnaps a tycoon’s grandson to get a ransom after she got fired from her job. But unexperienced and more addicted than ever, she gets into even deeper trouble as she flees with the kid towards the Mexican frontier…

The last news we had from Erick Zonca were ten years ago on the occasion of the release of The Little Thief, a year after the acclaimed Dreamlife of Angels. His new picture comes finally on screens, after he fought for years, refusing many projects in France and in the United States. Julia reminds of Cassavetes, from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie to Gloria, but far from a remake Zonca rather uses these references as a basis to pay a tribute to this independent American cinema, which inspired itself from the French nouvelle vague. Julia explores the wild spaces of California through Yorick Le Saux’s brilliant cinematography -the latter worked a lot with François Ozon. The elegant camera captures the emotions of the characters in beautiful frames and makes us share the journey of a lost soul. To embody the heroine and give her the necessary humanity that would make us love this terrible character, Zonca had to find an outstanding actress. Tilda Swinton, who recently received an Academy Award for her part in Michael Clayton, is Julia. As strong as fragile, as seductive in the euphoria of a wild party as broken when she wakes up on the backseat of a car where she ended her night, she gives a thrilling performance in this very demanding role. Julia is both a remarkable woman portrait and a brilliant tense thriller. Scrambling references from one genre to another, Julia sets the marks for a new French cinema, which combines developed characters and pure action. As a number of French directors go to Hollywood to make films they can’t do in France, Zonca does the same trip to make there a French film (the production and the senior crew being French) and make it his own way, far from a touristy or exotic cinema.

Read Erick Zonca’s interview about Julia here.
More details about The Little Thief.