Three Rooms of Melancholia (Melancholian 3 Huonetta)
My favourite film at the recent Cracow Film Festival, and one that I hope gets picked up by a distributor in the UK soon is Three Rooms of Melancholia (Melancholian 3 Huonetta) by female Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo. Strangely enough, it was out of the main competition as I thought it was the best film there. It was actually included in the World Documentary Premieres section and screened at a smaller cinema.
In this powerful documentary, the rooms of the title represent three separate stories of children caught up in the Caucasus conflict against their will. One is in a Russian Cadets' Academy training camp on Kronstadt Island near St Petersburg, a place where young kids are trained to fight an unknown 'enemy' (Chechens). In Gronzo, three children suffer heartbreak at leaving their ill and bed-ridden mother in her virtually empty flat. The final sequence in Ingushetia, just outside war-torn Chechnya, shows one woman taking care of Grozno orphans. The documentary plays on the idea that it doesn't try to find answers but seeks an original and concise way of asking the question, particularly in war. Honkasalo's film is poetic and captivating which allows her to depict some of the disturbing scenes that we will see.
I talk about this film in slightly more depth in my overview of the recent Cracow Film Festival, the 45th edition, on the main Kamera site. It is also discussed in much greater depth by Anu Koivunen and Tytti Soila in the Wallflower Press released The Cinema of Scandanavia. Tytti Soila is also the editor of the book and must have been impressed with the film to not only co-analyse it herself, but to include it in a complete overview of the history of Scandanavian Cinema, of which there could of course have been many to choose from.
Regards Three Rooms of Melancholia, it has also been recognised in this year's Thessaloniki Documentary Festival with the FIPRESCI award from the International Federation of Film Critics, and Honkasalo was also honoured by the festival with a mini-retrospective of her work to date. Let's hope this film comes to the attention of the Andi Engel's of the world if it hasn't done so already.
My favourite film at the recent Cracow Film Festival, and one that I hope gets picked up by a distributor in the UK soon is Three Rooms of Melancholia (Melancholian 3 Huonetta) by female Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo. Strangely enough, it was out of the main competition as I thought it was the best film there. It was actually included in the World Documentary Premieres section and screened at a smaller cinema.
In this powerful documentary, the rooms of the title represent three separate stories of children caught up in the Caucasus conflict against their will. One is in a Russian Cadets' Academy training camp on Kronstadt Island near St Petersburg, a place where young kids are trained to fight an unknown 'enemy' (Chechens). In Gronzo, three children suffer heartbreak at leaving their ill and bed-ridden mother in her virtually empty flat. The final sequence in Ingushetia, just outside war-torn Chechnya, shows one woman taking care of Grozno orphans. The documentary plays on the idea that it doesn't try to find answers but seeks an original and concise way of asking the question, particularly in war. Honkasalo's film is poetic and captivating which allows her to depict some of the disturbing scenes that we will see.
I talk about this film in slightly more depth in my overview of the recent Cracow Film Festival, the 45th edition, on the main Kamera site. It is also discussed in much greater depth by Anu Koivunen and Tytti Soila in the Wallflower Press released The Cinema of Scandanavia. Tytti Soila is also the editor of the book and must have been impressed with the film to not only co-analyse it herself, but to include it in a complete overview of the history of Scandanavian Cinema, of which there could of course have been many to choose from.
Regards Three Rooms of Melancholia, it has also been recognised in this year's Thessaloniki Documentary Festival with the FIPRESCI award from the International Federation of Film Critics, and Honkasalo was also honoured by the festival with a mini-retrospective of her work to date. Let's hope this film comes to the attention of the Andi Engel's of the world if it hasn't done so already.
posted by Steven Yates at 3:11 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home