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HomeFestivalsRed Sea Film Festival 2021 | Dispatch #2

Red Sea Film Festival 2021 | Dispatch #2

We are in the fourth day of the festival. One noticeable point about the Red Sea Festival is that most of the important events happen from about 3 in the afternoon until late at night. Perhaps the hot Saudi weather prevents any morning showings. The mornings, then, provide the opportunity for writing about the movies or taking part in meetings. The organizers have also set up a market area and several companies have taken the opportunity to introduce their movies.

There have also been several parties where it was possible to make contact with those in the film industry and discuss their projects. On the other hand, the hotel provided by the festival is quite distant from the festival venue, about 20 minuets by car, which has made commuting difficult. One must be careful not to miss the shuttles provided by the festival.

Overall, though, the festival is well-run and professional. And as we get to the middle days of the festival, the audiences are increasing. Once on the site, you can enjoy the environment of the festival to the fullest. Contrary to other festivals that I have attended this year, here we do not have to wear masks in the salons. The organizers simply checked the vaccination cards at the beginning of the festival and issued an approved badge. In the afternoons while walking, we visit local people who have come to the venue either for watching films or just out of curiosity. We also hear the local music that is being played. The setting in Jeddah’s old town also makes it possible for learn about the city’s fascinating history.

I managed to watch Brighton 4th yesterday which had won Tribeca’s best film award. It is a comic-tragidy by Levan Koguashvili, a Georgian director which is about a wrestling champion whose son is  in financial straits in USA. A bitter dark Eastern European atmosphere pervades the film. There is a refreshing lack of judgment when it comes to things like gambling, which is shown as neither good nor evil, but simply as something that might have a positive or negative effect on a person’s life. We can see deadpan characters which remind us of Emir Kusturica and Wes Anderson’s oeuvre. This film, which took seven years to make, is completely unpredictable. The performance of protagonist Levan Tedaishvili, who was in fact a wrestling champion at one point, was particularly memorable.

Another film I managed to watch was Hit the Road by Panah Panahi who was the winner of the London festival, too. The structure of this Iranian film recalls Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi’s films. This is a road trip film about a boy who wants to flee his country while his family accompanies him. The photography and score work wonderfully together, as the director sought to evoke a sense of nostalgia through the use of classic Persian songs. Although the pace of the film in some scenes is too slow, the film has some great images to offer. On the other hand, it is said that in films with long scenes, there comes a certain freedom to watch and observe. Here this manifests itself as an opportunity to discover magic in a banal situation. However, in this film the director sometimes tried to make the framework more beautiful and give dual meaning to them using technology. In some scenes, we see a framework of sky where a meteorite is moving, and it is clear that it was added through computer effects; or we see a very beautiful scene to which fog effects have been added, and this shows that creating beautiful pictures has been more important for the director than realism. This has created a feeling of uncertainty over the creator’s ability to transcend our ordinary conception of the world. This ambiguity is apparent in particular at the end of the film. The film could have ended in several different ways and it is not clear why this specific ending, in which a dog lies dying, was selected. There is a feeling that the author was trying to embed us in his magic as much as possible.

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