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Fresh Film Fest: Day Three Tips

Friday marks the start of the second half of the 8th Annual Fresh Film Fest. Today’s tips will mainly concern evening and night, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t leaf through the catalogue for yourself, albeit briefly. But now let us see the tips for August 26th 2011, the third day of the freshest cinema in town.

The cornerstone of Brazilian director José Padilha’s loose trilogy was called Bus 174 and you can see it today at 7:30 p.m. at Ponec Theatre. The plot of the documentary centers on the events of June 12th 2000 (coincidentally, June 12th is the day Brazilians celebrate Valentine’s Day), when the 174 bus was hijacked and the ensuing live broadcast from the crime scene monopolized the TV channels all around the country for the next four and a half hours. Padilha conceived the documentary as a careful investigation based on extensive research of stock footage, interviews and official documents.  The film does not only explain the dramatic events that unfolded as the police tried, and failed, to handle the hijack situation. It also tells the harsh life story of the hijacker, revealing how a typical Rio de Janeiro street kid was transformed into a violent criminal.

Světozor Cinema will dim its lights for the second feature film of the talented South Korean director Na Hong-jin, The Yellow Sea, which is one of the first Korean films that has been co-produced by a big Hollywood studio. In the successor of the very positively reviewed debut feature, The Chaser, Na Hong-jin decided to sail the waters of the thriller genre, although he bends its rules to his own liking. The hero of the film, a taxi driver living in the Korean province in China, sends his wife to earn some money in Korea but later receives no message from her. Tormented by jealousy, he accepts a local gangster’s offer to arrange his journey to Seoul on condition that he kills somebody there. The hero thus becomes the target of the police, the slick city mafia and the beastly redneck gangsters. The traditional thriller theme of an ordinary man, who finds himself in a situation which is beyond his control, develops into an intensive mixture of tragic drama and tough action.

After the concert of the Czech band Le Pneumatiq, whose sound will envelop the audience in the atmosphere of the 1990s, and after a light-painting workshop (which you can attend for free today and tomorrow, meeting point at 10 p.m. in front of the festival centre), the stage at Palác Akropolis will be taken over by police badges and Leslie Nielsen. At 10:30 p.m., Akropolis will offer the first incarnation of the legendary Sergeant Frank Dreblin, who became famous in the late 1980s and early 1990s Naked Gun comedy film series. It’s not surprising then, that the same team of creators is also responsible for the Police Squad! series, shamefully cancelled by a Programme Director at ABC after only six episodes. He didn’t have sympathy for the unmistakable style and humour and so the series had to leave the TV screens. However, after the huge success of Naked Gun, the Police Squad! unsurprisingly returned to the TV, and even though is only has six episodes, it was a sensation with the audience and soon achieved a cult status.

The most interesting event of the 3rd festival day is the very first edition of Fresh Film Ride, prepared in cooperation with Auto*Mat, a civil initiative aiming at safe, healthy and living Prague whose main focus is to support and develop walking, cycling and using public transport in Prague. The Ride starts at 6:30 p.m. at Náplavka, under Rašínovo nábřeží, it will pass through Prague streets and end at Riegerovy Sady, where the screening of the American horror movie Stake Land will take place at approximately 9 p.m. Stake Land can be described as a mixture of a vampire film, western elements and the gloomy post-apocalyptic vision of Cormac McCarthy’s Road. After the vampire epidemic had spread, the society collapsed, remaining people live in the closed communities and the only thing that keeps them sane are rumours of the New Eden in the North which the bloodthirsty beasts have not reached yet. The gloomy journey of teenage Martin accompanied by a rough vampire slayer present us with various images of the world confronted with supernatural disaster.

Today is also the last chance of catching Katarzyna Kozyra, a member of the jury, performing at Instytut Polski in Prague (at 4 p.m.), and the only chance to see Chris Kraus’s film The Poll Diaries, at 10 p.m. in Cinema 35.