HPR

Thoughts on the 11th annual Fargo Film Festival

By Christopher P. Jacobs
Staff Writer

Its 11th year now completed, the Fargo Film Festival has come into its own. The major categories of narrative feature and short, documentary feature and short, animated, experimental, student, and indigenous voices, provided for an intriguing variety of movies that were submitted from across the country and around the world. Titles came from Russia, Canada, Germany, England, Ireland, Australia, and across the United States, as well as plenty of North Dakota and Minnesota-made student movies. The popular 2-minute movie contest had so many entries this year that not all could be screened in the allotted time.

Screenings kicked off last Tuesday night and ran all day from Wednesday through Saturday. The morning and afternoon sessions had double screenings using the Fargo’s “Off-Broadway” auditorium. Each evening was in the Fargo Theatre proper with Saturday night devoted to the awards presentations and screenings of the major “best of fest” award-winners and honorable mentions. The evening sessions were well-attended, although not quite as full as I recall from last year’s festival. Due to classes and other activities, I was only able to get down to Fargo for the Friday and Saturday events, but it was well-worth the daily drive.

One of the festival highlights was certainly the visit of eccentric and cult favorite Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, who appeared at the Friday luncheon panel discussion, introduced screenings of two of his films Friday evening, and then discussed his career with MSUM alum David Filipi, now film programmer at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio.

Maddin’s somewhat autobiographical feature “Cowards Bend the Knee” is an oddly entertaining and typically twisted story originally shown as a 10-part art museum installation, and as the director explained, is a rare combination of Maddin’s favorite genres – silent melodrama, film noir and hockey movie, all revolving around a beauty salon. The preceding short, “The Heart of the World,” had been commissioned for the 2000 Toronto Film Festival and is an audaciously flamboyant and dramatically dense 6-minute, silent, science-fiction epic in the style of 1920s Soviet propaganda films.

The Best of Show award deservedly went to the winner of Best Narrative Short, Joshua Weigel’s moving 22-minute drama, “The Butterfly Circus.” The story follows a Depression-era traveling carnival and its effect upon both its performers and its audiences, focusing on the changing self-image of a man born without arms or legs who joins the troupe. One of the film’s actors, Doug Jones, spoke at the Fargo Thursday evening, and at Saturday’s screening he mentioned that this is the favorite of all the films he has done (which include “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” movies).

Closing out the festival was “I Shall Remember,” winner of the Best Narrative Feature award, directed by Vitaly Vorobjev of Moscow, Russia. This touching World War II drama was based on the true story of two boys, one Jewish and the other ethnically Greek, in a southern Soviet town as the Germans invaded. It gives a personal look into the complicated human relationships going on, with some townspeople trying to shelter Jews, others helping them to escape, and others collaborating with the German army.

Two honorable mentions in the Narrative Feature category are also worth looking for if and when they get theatrical or video distribution (and both directors attended the Saturday luncheon panel). Mike Flanagan’s “Abstentia” is an involving character drama that gradually turns into a supernatural thriller and quite spooky horror film as it progresses. Colin McIvor’s “Cup Cake,” an entry from Northern Ireland, is a bit slow-starting but develops into an endearing romantic comedy of a nerdy robot enthusiast who is stuck running his family bakery but owes money to the town’s two-man mafia, gets himself reluctantly engaged, and then falls for a beautiful foreign runaway who gets a job at the new supermarket that is his main competition.

The Best Animation winner was the artistically impressive Canadian film, “The Silence Beneath the Bark,” with a couple of odd little creatures experiencing the wonders of snow in a forest. Equally and arguably even more impressive, however, were the category’s Honorable Mentions, “The Gruffalo” and “The Lost Thing,” both of which were Academy Award contenders and the latter of which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short. “The Gruffalo” is a cute Aesop’s Fable-like fairytale of a mouse trying to survive by his wits. “The Lost Thing” is a truly delightful fantasy of a young man in the near future who discovers a peculiar creature inhabiting some industrial junk and clashes with the indifference of family, friends, and government officials in his quest to find it a suitable home.

Winner of Best Documentary Short was the quietly powerful and very moving “Found,” by Paramita Nath of Toronto, recounting the true story of poet Souvankham Thammavongsa’s personal journey as a premature baby expected to die as her family was trying to escape war-torn Laos in the 1970s, a story she accidentally discovered in a discarded scrapbook.

An Honorable Mention in the Experimental category is also a documentary, Sylvia Turchin’s visually and rhythmically striking “131 Russ,” a sort of visual poem about a decaying factory building in San Francisco.

A tradition for over a decade now, the Fargo Film Festival is one of North Dakota’s best opportunities for local people to get a taste of the international film festival experience and for the international filmmakers who attend to sample the legendary Fargo ambiance and attitude.

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