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Fresh Film Fest: Day Four Tips

The fourth and penultimate day of Fresh Film Fest 2011 offers a very rich programme, so this will possibly be the toughest decision-making of the whole festival. Two venues in particular, Světozor Cinema and Cinema 35, will have the main say. Here you have the tips for August 27th 2011, the fourth day of the Fresh.

At 5 p.m., Světozor will screen for the second and last time the documentary The Green Wave, which won the award for the best direction at One World Festival in Prague. Its author, Ali Samadi Ahadi, is a German director of Iranian origin and has been awarded for his work multiple times. The Green Wave offers a complex and highly suggestive portrayal of the 2009 presidential elections in Iran. The young generation believed that the tide of change and the turning point were coming, so they went into the streets. Músáví seemed to be a clear winner of the elections; however, the conservative president wanted to win at any cost and did not hesitate to use brutal means of intimidation. The combination of animation, mobile phone records, bloggers’ quotations and respondents’ testimonies create a convincing picture of totality and the feelings of young Iranian generation.

At 5:30 p.m. you can catch the second screening of the Belgian mockumentary Vampires at Palac Akropolis.

The greatest attraction of Saturday’s programming is undoubtedly the American film Winter’s Bone, worthily acclaimed not only by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (four Oscar nominations) but at festivals all around the world (12 awards from international festivals including Sundance or Berlinale). The screening starts at 7 p.m., Cinema Světozor. Winter’s Bone builds on pure and credible performance of the cast, mostly non-actors, the actual inhabitants of Ozark Mountains, where the film is set. 17 year-old Ree embarks on a mission to find her father after he uses their family house as a way of securing his bail and disappears without a trace. Ree, taking care of her two young siblings and self-insufficient mother, can’t let her home be taken. Being turned out into the Ozark woods, Ree challenges her outlaw kin’s code of silence and risks her life to save her family. She hacks through the lies, evasions and threats offered by her relatives and begins to piece together the truth.

At 8:30 p.m., Cinema 35 at the French Institute will screen Monsters, a film by British director and screenwriter Gareth Edwards, who not only wrote and directed it, but also took care of the shooting as a cinematographer. The film works with the premise of a space probe crash, which causes half of the US-Mexican border to become a quarantine zone. We enter the story as the situation in Mexico is getting worse and a young journalist is hired by his employer to get his daughter out of the country. Having missed the last official flight from Mexico, they are left with no other option but to reach the USA by crossing the zone infected by aliens. The film was made literally on a shoestring and became a festival sensation of last year. Watch as the two main characters become close at the backdrop of a forbidden yet peculiarly beautiful territory.

At 9:30 p.m., Světozor Cinema will present the second Yes Men movie, The Yes Men Fix the World. After their debut feature called simply The Yes Men (2003), the duo going by the names of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano (their real names, however, are Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos) comes with a sequel, a documentary depicting the true story of the now-famous activists. Andy and Mike refuse to give up while others are standing by indifferently. They enter the space where the powerful feel absolutely safe. Armed especially with their ideas, humour and media, Yes Men simply refuse to remain silent which is exactly what most of us do and thus legitimize the unacceptable (softly speaking) manners of the powerful. They pretend to be top managers of giant corporations and use the media to reveal shocking actions. The second Yes Men film won the Audience Award at the Festival in Berlin and an award at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam.

At the same time as The Yes Men Fix the World, Ponec Theatre will screen the American horror film Stake Land for the second time.

The fourth day of Fresh Film Fest will also see the closing part of Brazilian director José Padilha’s loose trilogy, Elite Squad 2, at 10:30 p.m. at Cinema 35. The film follows the story of BOPE (elite Brazilian squad) and its leader, Captain Nascimento. After a bloody attack on the local prison which is witnessing an outbreak of a rebellion, Nascimento is moved to the Public Security Department. He has the opportunity to keep an eye on and later also influence the corruption and criminality which are spreading to the highest political ranks. Since its introduction to the Brazilian cinemas, the film has marked the biggest commercial success in the history of Brazilian cinema.