This weekend, there has been there 45th Tampere Film Festival. In total I have seen 27 (28 to be correct, I forgot one when writing this for the first time) short movies within the last 30 hours. As an exercise to myself I am going to try to remember all of them with a short summary:
I started yesterday evening with „A Wall is a Screen“. This is a German group which organizes short movie screenings in the form of a city tour. After each movie the projector as well as the speakers and a notebook are carried to the next place. The movies were, in this order (not sure if I remember all of them):
- A documentary about an African guy who organizes movie screenings in Tanzania.
- A discussion between retired cleaning brushes [sic!] about built-in obsolescence (in German).
- An animated movie (cartoon style but a bit surreal) to music.
- A guy trying to surprise his girlfriend wearing a bear costume. She is so frightened that she takes her bike down a cliff. She survives and he is killed by a hunter.
- A movie showing the squeezing of passengers into the Tokyo Metro (shown in the Tampere train station).
- A guy drinking beer very fast, then puking, while another guy records all his sounds to make music out of it.
- Another quite surreal movie with people moving around a shopping mall to music.
Screening of a movie in the Tampere railway station. Picture taken with my mobile phone camera.
Today I started by visiting an art exhibition in the Hervanta library. After that I went back to the city center to continue with the film festival. The next session was a series of 7 movies of Sami people, the indigenous people of northern Finland, Norway and Sweden:
- A confusing movie about a guy fighting another hooded man who appeared to be some sort of ghost. Maybe a fight against his dark side.
- A father playing father playing with his daughter while the mother is sick. The girl suspects that her father has an affair with a veterinarian who comes to check their dog.
- A girl on her first period is instructed on natural medicine by her grandmother who died long before.
- A movie about Samish rebels not being taken serious by the Norwegian king and prime minister. A woman tries to seduce one of the Sami, he ties her up and leaves her in a tent.
- A girl and a guy living on opposite sides of a river. She walks through the river (under water) to get to his house.
- Two teenage girls having their first experiences with boys and travelling as hitchhikers.
- A Sami village is visited by a Christian priest and his two assistants. They burn the Samis‘ hats because they are allegedly connected to the devil. A girl tries to escape them by jumping into a lake and diving.
For lunch I visited the Tampereen Kauppahalli, an old indoor marketplace. It contains a restaurant which serves great lunch for only 5€ for students!
The next movie session consisted of four movies by the same Ukrainian director. I got the ticket for free, because I answered questions about the European union the day before correctly. The movies were all a bit disturbing…
- The incident: Two parallel storylines: A young couple drives a car to visit the girl’s father. At the same time her father, who lives in a small cottage in the forest, meets an old friend and gets drunk with him. The couple accidentally runs over a man directly next to the father’s house. This man survives and he and another man then beat up the driver, one of them rapes the girl and they leave in the car. The father does not notice anything.
- The diagnosis: A guy and his pregnant girlfriend meet friends in an occupied building. The building is raided by the police and the girl is taken to a hospital, where she delivers her child. She is then told that she and her child are HIV-positive. One of their friend suffocates the child because they fear that it will be tortured by extracting its organs. They flee from the hospital (Link, full).
- Deafness: A policeman shows up next to a school/orphanage(?) for deaf people. He interrogates a deaf guy by writing on a notebook. He and another policeman nearly suffocate the guy because he (apparently) does not answer. They leave and the deaf guy limps back to the building (Link, full)
- Nuclear waste: A man drives a truck to a facility, where they lift a big tube made of concrete from the truck. He continues to another facility, goes in there, gets undressed and takes a shower. A woman washes his clothes. The two of them meet, have sex and leave. Not a word is spoken and this action takes 25min! (Link, full)
In the evening I watched another series of nine short movies:
- A documentary about train raiders in South Africa (Link, full)
- A guy taking his child daughter with him on a cabrio ride in Switzerland (Link, short extract)
- A quite entertaining cheerful animated music video (Link, full)
- A documentary about the last days of an unidentified man who died in Ireland who was known by the name „Peter Bergmann“ (Link, full)
- A somehow disturbing cartoonish and surrealistic music video with strange characters and skulls melting and transforming into each other (Link, full)
- A guy trying to remember his friend’s name after meeting him at a bar. The though process is illustrated as the game show „Password“ going on in his brain. (Link, extract)
- An Israeli movie about a guy accidentally deleting the last footage of his deceased mother. He tries to recreate the footage using household items („I think this is the closest to how the footage looked“) (Link, full)
- An animated music video with glass balls and boxes. (Link, full)
- A 25-year old Swedish guy who still lives with his parents and tries to work as a magician. (Link, full)
Note to myself: I only had to look up the names to be reminded of two of the movies. I think that is not too bad for watching 27 movies 😀
Edit: I just realized I forgot one of the „A wall is a screen“ movies: An animation only using extracts of Leonardo da Vinci’s „Last Supper“. That makes it 28 movies.