This is frustrating. I logged onto the guest ticket website yesterday morning at exactly 8:30 a.m. and was unable to get any tickets for the movies I really wanted to see. It appears to be a problem for others as well. I talked to one old hand who lives in Korea and asked if it was because there were so many more guests this year, and he pointed out that the festival anticipated a larger turnout and thus increased the number of screenings per film, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to meet the demand, especially for that handful of films that they should have predicted would be very popular. And, as it turns out, those are the movies I want to see. Many of them are Korean movies that have already opening theatrically in Korea, but Korean people want to see them here because the directors and actors are showing up for Q&A sessions. In any case, he agreed the system has to improve if BIFF wants to be as big as its dreams.

I had an interesting interview yesterday with Neeraj Churi, the head of Lotus Media. He produced two of the Indian movies I saw on Thursday, both of which dealt with LGBTQ themes. That’s pretty much what he does. Probably the most famous movie he’s produced is Cactus Pears, which won an award at Sundance and the Grand Prix at last year’s Tokyo Filmex. It’s a movie about two gay men who connect after many years when one of the men returns to his home village to attend his father’s funeral. Right now he’s mainly producing movies for Indian directors but he wants to start working with Southeast Asian filmmakers. We talked for about an hour, not just about films but also about the social situation for LGBTQ individuals in India, in particular how that situation compares to the West. I will post a transcript of our conversation at later date on this blog.

I saw another Indian movie yesterday, a world premiere, though it didn’t have any LGBTQ characters to my knowledge. The title character of Selvi is a home caregiving nurse who works for a private service in Mumbai, meaning that all her customers are well off financially. She is studying to get a caregiving license in Singapore. She is pretty much the breadwinner for her family, who still live in the town where she grew up. She has also managed to secure employment for her best friend since childhood, a young woman who is emotionally unstable and tends to take a lot of days off, which means Selvi has to cover her shifts. The movie has the nervous energy of those medical dramas where the doctors and nurses are overwhelmed by their work, except that Selvi is a caregiver, meaning she looks after old people in their private homes and thus doesn’t get any help while actually on the job. Most of the time she just sits around, but when an emergency happens she is sort of helpless. But the main drama revolves around Selvi’s unreliable friend, which makes it more of a personal story.

I managed to snag a ticket for Filipiñana, which has generated quite a bit of buzz at other festivals. It’s a rather dry black comedy that takes place at an upscale golf club in Manila. The comic dynamic springs from the class differences between the patrons and the staff. It’s got a kind of languorous Finnish vibe that flattens all the emotions, regardless of what actually happens on screen. A few of the rich characters are cartoons, and I wanted to know more about the “development” in the countryside that displaced many of these employees. Essentially, they have been forced out of agriculture in the rural north islands to work in the big city, except that they are working at a country club, which is really a simulation of rural circumstances in that the grass and trees are all part of a design. The movie has a shock ending that, due to the artificially imposed stillness, doesn’t have much of a shock effect, but I suppose that was the intention. 

It’s My Time, a Chinese film, is in the Gala Section, though I’m only glancingly familiar with the director, Bai Xue. The main attraction is its lead actor, Michelle Yeoh, who is this year’s Asian Filmmaker of the Year. It’s a pretty standard Chinese entertainment, fast-moving and overly sentimental. Yeoh plays a 70-year-old woman who moved into an assisted living facility after suffering a stroke. She’s much better now thanks mainly to her rebel spirit, which doesn’t suffer fools lightly. The gimmick is a young  Rubik’s Cube master who is down on his luck and takes a gig teaching how to beat the toy to the assembled seniors since the manager of the facility thinks that such knowledge will ward off encroaching senility (though, in fact, he thinks it will just put them to sleep, which is his real goal). Yeoh’s character full gets into the toy because she was once a math teacher (she appears to have had a lot of jobs in the past). Eventually, she becomes really good at it with the help of the young master. It’s like a kung fu action movie except all the acrobatics are in the head. The technical stuff surrounding the complicated competitions went way over my head, and while the movie was predictable from the get-go, Yeoh is appealing in a feisty way. She looks her age and, to a certain extent, acts it, too, even more so than in that movie that won her an Oscar.