Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival 2015 Review

Film enthusiasts were treated to more than 100 features, documentaries and shorts from across the Asia Pacific over eleven days. The second Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival provided a rare chance to see many award-winning films and premieres for the region.

The Turkish film Frenzy, which was publicly screened in Australia for the first time in this festival, was Jury Grand Prize Winner at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards which also took place in Brisbane. A unique and surreal film, Frenzy tells the story of Kadir who is released from prison into a dystopian and violent Istanbul. Having been away for twenty years, Kadir finds much has changed but tries to rebuild a relationship with his brother Ahmet.

Kadir inspect’s people’s rubbish, a job his parole depends on, while Ahmet is part of a covert dog- shooting unit. The sinister and unpredictable situation drives both slowly mad by their own paranoia.
Kadir is desperate to find out what happened to their middle brother but fears something terrible has happened to him or even worse, he has done something terrible.

Before the end of the film comes an awful realisation for the audience that perhaps one or both Kadir and Ahmet were not as paranoid as they may have believed.

Frenzy was an easy film to get absorbed in and really holds the attention. Although distinctly Turkish, the struggles it depicts, although extreme, could be seen as universal.

A highlight of the festival was Jafar Panahi’s Tehran Taxi that saw the filmmaker, banned from making movies by Iranian authorities for 20 years, use a dashboard mounted camera and the people who hop into his backseat to tell his story. The experiences, wisdom and hearts of those who happen to get into the car provide a poignant snapshot into the city.

When a woman and her badly heart husband are travelling to the hospital, the man asks for a camera phone so he can make his last will and make sure his wife will be okay. After dropping them off, the woman continues to ring the cab driver looking for the film her husband made. When the cab driver asks in a slightly confused way if the man has not recovered, the woman does not pause and simply says one never knows. This was the kind of comedy that just couldn’t be written or acted to work as well as it does hear.

The relationship between the film-maker and his niece, with a terrifying stare and machine gun mouth, is certainly the heart of the film. The young girl is too innocent to have any concept of the country’s oppression that the audience can see everywhere within the film.

Like Frenzy, Tehran Taxi also holds a poignant and shocking ending.

The Iran theme was continued in the proceeding short, The Phoenix. This Melbourne-shot tale of a teacher fighting to restore balance in the lives of teenagers in a detention centre had a feeling of lost youth was almost palpable and boasted an excellent performance from Manouchehr Farid, an acclaimed New Wave Iranian actor.

The darkly comic Chinese The Coffin in the Mountain was thoroughly enjoyable. Winner of the Grand Prix at Warsaw Film Festival, this is a clever piece. The film centres around the stories of three different characters: An accidental killer and even more accidental father, a woman driven to consider murder by an abusive relationship and a town leader trying to put all the pieces together.

As the three stories fill in blanks in each other’s tales, debut director Xin Yukun has created an awesome web of cause and effect with a killer shock twist arriving before the end as a lie is revealed. Although it tells the same story from three different views, the film remains fresh with a good use of flashbacks and enough surprises to keep it’s audience.

Another Chinese film, A Corner of Heaven, was not as enjoyable. Moving very slowly with long shots that seem self-indulgent, this film boasts a moody atmosphere but disappoints in terms of story and demands a lot of patience from its audience.

The Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival returns in 2016.

By David Hennessy