P I C K S O F T H E B U N C H
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Slidin' Bright and Shiny World
The festival opener is a hazily beautiful collaborative effort by Barbara Albert, Reinhard Jud and Michael Grimm which segues seamlessly among three stories of teenagers in contemporary Austria. The phosphorescent world of malls, clubs and parties the film creates is eerily familiar, evoking the landscape of "Kids," but without its easy, cynical edge. From one young girl's brutal loss of innocence to the culture shock experienced by big-city kids when their car breaks down in a po-dunk town, these protagonists are in earnest, and their touching, funny and heartbreaking encounters in the teen underground take on a reality that "Kids" never quite could.
Mondo Roxy: No Other Drugs Required
If it's the club kid experience you're really after, for sheer sensation check out Ian Kerkhof's trance-inducing documentary about the infamous Amsterdam hotspot, Club Roxy, and its 10th anniversary party. Mixing documentary footageoverheard conversations, dionysiac dancerswith digital technology and a psychedelic sensibility, Kerkhof creates a subjective experience of the drug-and-dance daze and a truly mind-altering movie.
Blablabla
If you're more into vogue with a capital "V," take this comedy of mannerisms from Juan Carlos Bonete, in which a dandyish drag-queen cum style diva filming his fashiontainment show is forced to share studio space with the poetasters of "Poetic Channel TV," who rival him in their self-absorption, narcissism and reverence for incoherent jargon. It's unfortunately easy to miss some of the breakneck banter and throwaway lines in the scattershot deliverybut then, that was true of "AbFab," too.
A Secret History of European Music Video
For sheer retro-chic Austin Powers charm, don't miss this clips show curated by Jim McDonnell, Craig Spencer and Mary Wharton. Tracing the strange genre of the music video from the early '60s to today, the dour narration plays off the wild variety of the shorts, which include never-before-seen footage of Brigitte Bardot, the Who, David Bowie, Queen, Kate Bush, Nina Hagen, Eurythmics, the Chemical Brothers and many artists you're guaranteed to have never even heard of, let alone seen, before.
Shabondama Elegy
Ian Kerkhof's film mixes graphic sex and crime footage with sequences of uncanny beauty to tell the sordid, touching story of a young Japanese prostitute who becomes emotionally entangled with a stoolpigeon who has been given only seven days to live by the police and the Yakuza. Her growing infatuation with her European lover brings to the surface her complicated feelings of complicity and guilt about the repeated rapes she experienced at the hands of her father. Edited with stunning and effective violence, the film includes a scene of the doomed man butt-fucking Keiko while gasping out an undeniably blasphemous version of the Lord's Prayer.
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