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Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg

16 November 2001

Retro entry. The Internationales Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg ran from November 10th to the 18th. There were 5 screens each in Mannheim and Heidelberg, with films usually playing from 4pm to 12pm or so. If you're not interested in hearing about movies, skip to the next entry. There's nothing hidden at the bottom. I don't even say that much specific stuff about the movies, so email me if you're interested in details.

I'm not sure how many different films were played, but they all played multiple times in both cities. I would guess around a hundred different films, many of which where in competition. Some were just labelled as "Discoveries" and others were the result of the "Mannheim meetings", films co-produced by the festival itself. It was the 50th anniversary of the festival, so there were also lots of older movies shown along side the brand new ones. I decided that film festivals, especially international film festivals, don't fall into my lap very often, and I ought to take advantage of it, even at the expense of sleep and work. There also aren't too many opportunities here to see films that are subtitled in English. (The foreign films which aren't shown here, including most of the American ones, are dubbed. You don't want to get me started on my dubbing rant. I hate dubbing with a passion. I think I already went on about it a while back, so I'll spare you now.) I didn't skip any classes, I did all my homework, and I still managed to see nine films in five days, five school days at that. I wasn't floored by any of them, but it was interesting to see films from so many different countries. The films that I saw were, in the order I saw them:

  • Wild Mussels - Netherlands
  • Letter to America - Bulgaria
  • Taxi - An Encounter - Argentina
  • Kira's Reason. A Love Story - Denmark
  • Thelma - Switzerland
  • Firefly Dreams - Japan
  • Mullet - Australia
  • Lovely Rita - Austria
  • Mona's World - Denmark
My favorite was Wild Mussels. You can see the end coming, but it's still really powerful. Firefly Dreams was also quite good. I couldn't quite accept the plot in Mona's World, but it was very well made. Kira's Reason was interesting, but it didn't meet my expectations. The characters and problems were intriguing, but the climax and resolution were odd. I think I had language comprehension problems with Lovely Rita, and I really didn't understand what the hell was going on. Thelma and Mullet were interesting, but left me wondering what the point was supposed to be. They weren't exactly choppy, but I didn't always understand the characters or their motivations. What's left? Taxi. Fairly well made I thought, but not remarkable. Too much intrusive music. Again, none of them had me in awe.

All of the ones not in English (all but Mullet) had English subtitles except for Thelma and Lovely Rita. Thelma was in French with German subtitles and I didn't have any trouble understanding, especially since the plot was pretty simple. I can read German well enough that I didn't notice for a few minutes that the subtitles weren't in English. Lovely Rita was in Austrian German with French subtitles and I had trouble with lots of dialogue. The French subtitles were actually a problem because I can either listen to the German or read the subtitles, not both. It would've been easier to listen if I hadn't been distracted by the subtitles. With Thelma, I could read the German and kind of listen to the French to fill in the holes where needed. My French vocab isn't good enough that it works the other way around. I need to ask someone to explain the ending of Lovely Rita to me, 'cause I was like: "Huh? I thought I understood, but where did *that* come from?" My friend from Chile who also saw it couldn't make sense of it, either. I need to ask a German or Austrian person who maybe caught more of the dialogue than I did.

I hope for most of these movies' sakes that they get a North American distributor, but I doubt too many of them will even come to arts theaters.

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