This is a documentary about a guy (Kahloucha) who's basically a Tunisian Ed Wood. It's a lot of fun to watch him make Tarzan of the Arabs (pictured above) and see all of his friends crack up as they watch his work. It's also interesting to see who his screen heroes are. I wasn't surprised that Clint Eastwood was his favorite but who expect to him to know Jim Kelly and Alain Delon? If I hadn't seen his movies I'd say that he has great taste.
This dead on parody of 70's sex flicks shows a remarkable attention to details. Just look at that room, the clothes on the men, and the turquoise eye-shadow on that woman. It invites (and deserves) comparisons to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, although this film is more limited in it's scope. I really admire it for playing the entire thing completely dead-pan. A lesser film would have given into the temptation to wink at the audience. After the first minute I thought, surely they can't keep this up for the whole movie? But they did, for two straight hours. That would be my only complaint, though, the length. It's a remarkable exercise but, at it's heart, it's a one-joke movie and I think a briefer runtime would help. It's not that the film ever drags, or that it feels padded. I just think it's a super-awesome movie that's screaming for a more ruthless editor.
This is the best documentary I've seen at the festival. It's about a man who shot his sleeping dorm-mate at Swarthmore College in 1955 and his decision to go public with this information after fifty years. He tells everybody, his daughters, his in-laws, his friends, his co-workers, his psychology students and the media. He says that he's coming forward because he wants to take a stand against bullying, which is what lead to his break-down and the subsequent killing (a the time he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial and spent almost five years in a hospital for the criminally insane). The film mostly follows his youngest daughter and her attempts to make sense of the situation which is only made more difficult when friends of the deceased come forward to deny that the killer was abused. It's a challenging film that raises many question (both ethical and factual) and doesn't provide any easy answers. It's a film that demands you to think.
This is a frighteningly claustrophobic Romanian horror film that is made all the more terrifying because it claims to be based on a true story. Of course, you can't always trust movies to tell you the truth about something like that (I'm looking at you, Fargo). It's incredibly suspenseful and it hits all the right notes. I'd say that it's a stand-out in the genre, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time.
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