And scattered throughout this matter of fact look at the interior of a freighter are smaller contrasts. Farrel napping in an extremely noisy part of the ship. Farrel alone in his bunk rather than in the common areas with others. Small electrical boxes and blinking panels against the shipping containers above decks. A bold credit sequence. This is all pretty loud, busy cinema for Alonso.

Then, as the ship hits its Argentine port, Farrel moves from the claustrophobic warrens of the ship to the chilly open spaces of rural Tierra del Fuego. After the requisite first night at port, he begins to hitchhike his way towards a village in the mountainous interior – plenty of space here for even more contrasts. A busy bar gives way to a ramshackle, yet quiet place to sleep it off. Night and day. Snow and sky. The farther Farrel makes it into the mountains, the less action each frame has to hang on to. The compositions become even more austere, controlled, and filled with the airy tension that seems to be drawing Farrel up to this small village.

In this quiet village we find a family he has abandoned, a dying mother, a small saw mill community that doesn’t even try to hide their disdain for him. And then in the middle of this unexpected narrative thicket is his developmentally disabled daughter. Somewhere in there, the film moves past Farrel into the more general sense of devastation left in the wake of his attempt to hide behind booze and distance. The minimalism born out of his self-imposed isolation begins to take on contours of the alcoholic desire for oblivion, of the failure’s compulsion to pare down and simplify as a material attempt to forget. Perhaps this is all reproduced in the unadorned spaces Alonso permits him, a visual purgatory.

In the film’s only grand gesture, Farrel hands his abandoned daughter the garish keychain bought on the way through Liverpool that he toyed with back in the tiny cabin on the freighter. Its reappearance is startling. She looks at it, a bit puzzled, and he walks away. She can’t read it, or possibly understand where it comes from. I still wonder if he is thinking about her in that scene towards the beginning, and then tosses the keychain in his bag in case he decides to go through with his little family reunion. Maybe it allows him to participate in the act of handing her something, a token gesture, without actually leaving anything of himself behind. I am not sure how to interpret this harrowing little gift otherwise. But one hardly leaves the film feeling as if whatever gesture it is that Alonso has offered us is as slight or obscure.

When I first started writing for Filmwell, I repeatedly voiced my intention to move to New York city. It seemed the cinematic centre of the world, at least when it came to films with a spiritual flavour. Dardenne and Tarkovsky retrospectives (with two of the three directors actually in attendance) made a Manhattan move almost mandatory. My own personal discovery of Big Apple films like The Sweet Smell of Success and The Apartment, combined with a consideration of the Gotham-inflected oeuvre of Whit Stillman and an addiction to film commentary in The New Yorker, caused me wonder if I had chosen the wrong Greatest City in The World to live in.

Until now.

I hereby officially declare the official opening of The Soul Food International Film Festival, right here in Vancouver, British Columbia. (Well, maybe not so official. It only just occurred to me around 5:00 this morning. And, it kind of already opened. So make that The First Non-Annual Soul Food Unintentional International Film Festival of Vancouver. Catchy title, eh? The NASFUIFFoV. Wonder if it’s too late to print up a festival program?)

The Magnificent Obsession

This Thursday night at Vancouver’s Pacific Cinematheque, The Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975, Russia) shows at 7:15, followed by The Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954, USA) at 9:15. The films are also showing separately on other nights this week (see the above links for specific times), but Thursday is the one night that offers a chance to view them back to back.

Seraphine

That’s an opportunity festival attendees may wish to take advantage of, given that Seraphine (Martin Provost, 2009, France/Belgium) is running Tuesday through Thursday at The Hollywood (9:15 nightly) and Munyurangabo (Lee Isaac Chung, 2007, Rwanda) plays Friday through Monday at the VanCity (various screening times).

Munyurangabo

Toss in local screenings of A Serious Man (2009, Joel & Ethan Coen, USA), maybe even Gentlemen Broncos (Jared Hess, 2009, USA) and It Might Get Loud (Davis Guggenheim, 2008, USA) for it’s profile of U2 guitarist The Edge, and you’ll have yourself a soul-satisfying cinematic smorgasbord the like of which is unlikely to be seen again. (At least, not until we launch our own rather more intentional Soul Food International Film Festival. Hmm…)

A Serious Man

Of course this can get annoying in a hurry. Chances are that if you audibly reference one iota of Monthy Python and The Holy Grail in public, there is going to be somebody nearby that will instantly launch into the “Knights who say Ni!” bit. But I suppose that is a necessary evil for a kind of filmmaking that celebrates the way that language, comedic dialogue, speech stripped of the commonplace, makes it easy for people to relate out there in the real world.

So I was thrilled to find that after watching Chris Grega’s new mockumentary Game of The Year, everyone else had the same response I did: “clip clop.”

That and a litany of other perfectly quotable bits and scenes that make the film such an unexpectedly engrossing experience. The film contains a documentary being made about a bunch middle aged guys, all old friends, that play lengthy and involved role playing games in someone’s basement. Think: The Office with Dungeons and Dragons in south county St. Louis. As the cameras roll, a supercilious Brit ex-pat leads each team member through the agonies and victories of their ongoing role playing game – meanwhile the documentary begins to leak out into their actual lives with unintended results. The cast of characters runs the gamut from archetypal geek, to self-hating geek, to ADD guy, and eventually the sound person (a girl!) even gets tossed into the mix when they need an additional player.

But there is a lot at stake. If they can successfully dominate an upcoming RPG challenge, they will win the opportunity to run a new gaming company for a year. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. Amidst the hilariously obscure tangents and arguments that cascade from attempts to prepare for the tournament of champions, jealousies and long held resentments begin to surface. We watch this group of friends break up and scatter, a marriage teetering in the balance. At a loss for a game, two of them actually begin prowling the streets like junkies, looking for a loremaster to guide them, and end up at the butt end of jokes delivered in a dwarvish/Klingon dialect. They then stumble across someone even more problematically related to the game than they are. It is a startling moment.

But they all kind of get their act together and make it to the tournament. By this time, Game of The Year has long hit its stride, and the mockumentary payoff is as hysterical (clip clop) as it is reflective about the way the game has affected all these people. It has become a way for them to collectively avoid the nitty gritty of life, and Grega charts their way out of this mess with equal parts joy and dignity. There are a lot of these RPG and LARP (live action role playing) mockumentaries and documentaries out there. Darkon’s take on LARP, for example, sometimes has a hard time hiding its smirk while dealing with the public perception of people that get so immersed in these kinds of hobbies. But Game of The Year seems more interested in its cast of characters than the fact that they are gamers. In fact, it is gratifying to see how quickly their passion for it evaporates when faced with more substantial alternatives.

I have enjoyed people’s response to this film almost as much as the film itself. It is hard to pull off a mockumentary, but Grega does it with quotable flair. Let’s see this one get St. Louis independent filmmaking on the map with its wonderful batch of inside jokes.

It is a crux that Bujalski places at exactly the right spot in all of his films, during which we catch his twenty-something subjects in the midst of transitions from relationship to relationship, college to real life, and through the kinds of crises we have time to indulge during that golden hour. PBS used to have a program that showed bee scientists gluing little labels to bees so that we could track the way they communicate with each other in the hive. The one with the blue diamond would dance a little jig that somehow told the one with the red square that there is a pollen mother lode on a flower fifty yards due southeast. It is all a bit baffling, but these insect two-steps made one think about what actually happens when we talk to each other in public or private. This kind of objective voyeurism is what I feel when watching most mumblecore cinema, but Bujalski has a knack for translating his coordinated character sketches into something more substantial than mere exercises in independent filmmaking.

In Beeswax, we watch Lauren and Jeannie (played by real life twin sisters) run a vintage clothing shop co-owned by someone who is about to take her issues with the direction of the store to civil court. After Jeannie enlists her ex-boyfriend’s legal advice and we begin to see the backstory of these sisters’ mutual dependence, Beeswax becomes an intricate pantomime of emotional maneuvering that lets us get behind all the predictable patterns to a subtext abuzz with things like doubt, fear, and apprehension.

The fact that Jeannie is wheelchair-bound is only incidental to a film in which it seems that every main character has needs. They all require some kind of long term care and help. Though they can’t quite talk to each other at intensely personal levels, they can’t conceive of not being part of each other’s daily routines. The conversations between Jeannie and her co-owner are so obtuse because we can’t imagine them actually looking at each other and saying: Why are you doing this? What is the deal here? That kind of admission would break the surface tension that has, at least so far, worked for them.

Just as their relationship becomes bound up in legal and contract language, so do Jeannie, Lauren, and Merrill seem to interact at a coded level. In one scene, a lawyer explains the meaning of the contract to Jeannie, and she responds a bit shocked. She wants to use the fact that she isn’t naturally capable of understanding technical legal language as an excuse for the situation. But she can’t. We are all locked into relationships based on speech and communication regardless of its inherent technical difficulties. Thank God for good sisters.

As this is also Bujalski’s most lush film to date; the Austin of Beeswax is as vibrant and colorful as their vintage shop. A scene towards the middle of the film that has Jeannie taking pictures of Lauren against a rural backdrop proves that descriptors like pastoral are far more sensible for his cinema than the m word.

This loose visit to The Postman Always Rings Twice throws the whole notion of new German cinema for a loop. But this is what Christian Petzold seems good at: throwing things off balance. Every jot and tittle of the film is intensely precise, as if engineered rather than directed. The landscape shots of this lush rural corner of Germany are clinically framed, every kind of movement in the film is exacting – it is an almost intimidating auteur experience.

But at the heart of the film lies an unruly mess of racial, cultural, and psychological currents that threaten to upset Petzold’s careful staging. The whole thing is a balancing act between genre and suspense, but also between theory and cinema, or even better – between Petzold’s ideas about cinema and the way they relate to these avatars of contemporary Germany.

Dishonorably discharged from the war in Afghanistan, Thomas is broke and sleeping on his recently deceased mother’s floor. He picks up whatever odd jobs he can until Ali, a local kebab shop tycoon with a few too many drunk driving convictions, hires him on as a delivery driver. On the other end of this classic noir triangle is Laura, who at first glimpse seems to be Ali’s trophy wife. Quiet but sternly masculine Thomas, the successful yet somewhat furtive Ali, and the textbook sultry Laura – you can tell where this is going. But then, as it turns out, we can’t. The basic genre building blocks are all there, but they start getting pushed around by Ali’s Turkish heritage, whatever it is that has followed Thomas home from Afghanistan, and Laura’s secrets.

It is hard to tell exactly where the film pivots on Petzold’s sleight of hand, but we are confronted by the fact that there is some sort of depth to Jerichow that is so often unexpected in genre film. It becomes contemporary, aware, critical, and provocative all at once. Implicit to Petzold’s direction is a criticism of the kind of race baiting that happened in Crash. In place of that unsubtle fearmongering stereotyping, he leaves these complex scenes that speak intensely to the psychological and racial diversity of his characters. The final moments of Jerichow happen so quickly, but resonate with a lot of unexpected issues.

The search for Fassbinder in recent German cinema is an engaging routine of critical play, but seems to be one that loses traction in Petzold’s direction. The way he embeds drama in perfectly staged sets of noise, landscape, and suspense – even melodramatic eros, makes any commentary on Fassbinder less interesting than his contemporary significance as a filmmaker that avoids the excesses of minimalist cinema and technique on the one hand, and clumsy social critique on the other. This is not to say that Jerichow represents a middle way, but that the Berlin School, which many suggest he represents, stands on its own two feet as a solution to a difficult representational problem. How do you make cinema that is obviously interested in theory without getting bogged down in concept? How do you think socially and cinematically at the same time? Where is this camera supposed to sit? Jerichow is a great answer to such niggling questions.

Munyurangabo is such a quiet, unassuming film that it feels odd to call it a great feat of naturalist filmmaking, but it undoubtedly is. Transit, movement, and flight are common themes in cinema in general. In African filmmaking this common motif has a built-in political dimension that has often led to ham-fisted scripts glossing over the complex mythos of war torn Africa with broad strokes of the white man’s burden. Chung’s first feature film is something completely different. As is the case with Munyurangabo, we often watch orphaned children, refugee families, and migrant workers shifting through landscapes in varying degrees of ruin or reconstruction. But Chung’s graceful attention to this backdrop – one that is now as much a part of global cinema as it is global politics – grants Munyurangabo a sense of innovation that in turn breeds legitimate hope.

We learn early on that young ‘Ngabo and Sangwa are on a journey to kill the man that murdered his father during the genocide. They plan to stop briefly at Sangwa’s house before continuing on, but this visit turns into a lengthy stay made awkward by the fact that ‘Ngabo is Tutsi. Sangwa hasn’t seen his house and family for three years, having fled to Kigali for work and refuge. So we watch the boys interacting with his family, relearning the domestic routines of Rwandan farming, working around the house, and being part of a rooted local community with its codes and cycles. The almost wordless scenes between Sangwa and his mother are masterfully maternal interludes that evoke a sense of healing, as if they are perfectly composed portraits of the balance that had been so horrifically upset by the genocide. (There is a Dutch Master quality to the heaviness of light, clear balance of line and color, and domestic focus in these scenes.) When Sangwa’s father teaches him the proper way to use a hoe in the field, we see the same thing. It is a little glimpse of hope and restoration that is later recycled in Sangwa’s effort to rebuild a crumbling wall of their house or carry water for the family. The tension in the film emerges from the different ways Sangwa and ‘Ngabo respond to these glimmers of possibility.

Though the film is a bit episodic, these aren’t just documentary vignettes composed and ordered in such a natural way. They are actually richly political snapshots of Sangwa and ‘Ngabo’s respective cultural journeys. It turns out that Munyurangabo is not just about two boys and the different ways they respond to the memory of “home”. It is about a culture faced with the task of forgiveness, with finding ways to handle the fresh memory of terror and genocide. In a seamless move from verité to a magical realism that seems just as natural as the rest of the film (which is steeped in sunlight, earth, water, mud, etc…), Chung suggests that the way out, at least for ‘Ngabo, involves a memorializing love for victims that manifests itself in breaking the cycle of violence and retribution. This makes every act of forgiveness a political statement attached to a more abiding social polity than racial division, one perhaps exemplified by the way his and Sangwa’s lives have become so intertwined.

The film was made on a small budget with a rag tag band of orphans and refugees he had met in Kigali. His decision to work with actual film rather than DV adds depth to the natural cinematography that may have otherwise been lost in the flatness of smaller cameras, or dulled by the sense of immediacy that attends a lot of plein air digital filmmaking. Though shot rather quickly, every frame of the film is so thoughtfully composed and that it is hard to believe this is Chung’s first feature length film.

(And thanks, Film Movement, who have distributed two of my favorite films of the year.)

There are a few reasons why the minimalism of Lake Tahoe stands out among the large annual festival crop of similarly pared down films. The first is that Eimbcke’s approach to filmmaking seems organically related to his set, the washed out right angles and open spaces of this dead-pan Yucatan town. When Juan crashes his car and begins the Quixotic task of getting it fixed, the camera simply follows the stark lines of his transition between home and shop and car. The film moves with all the fluidity of a slide show.

A second reason is that much of Lake Tahoe involves watching Juan becoming embroiled in the domestic routines of those he encounters. They have to eat breakfast with their dog first. They have to look for the right part. They have to wait in doorways for a Bruce Lee obsessed mechanic to show up. Their baby just fell asleep. These aren’t the most exciting activities, and Eimbcke doesn’t feel the need to make them seem more than what they are.

And a third reason is that Lake Tahoe is a film that works in cycles. The second time through its minimal material, we begin to see everything that wasn’t as apparent the first half of the film. Our suspicion that there is a lot to this film is confirmed, and subtle realizations begin to unravel that tap into the collective sense of loss Juan’s small family is dealing with in different ways. Little happens, but as these gestures continue to cycle, they start to come into focus.

We never actually see the events that cause the film: the death of Juan’s father and then Juan’s fender bender. The former event predates the film, and the latter happens while the screen is blacked out. It is an odd experience, but one that keeps happening throughout the film with increasing frequency. It happens when music is playing, when people are finishing a thought, or in a grand celebration of film sound – something with which Lake Tahoe is very preoccupied – when we get to hear an entire scene of Enter the Dragon in a movie theater. Bruce Lee’s grunts, the squish of flesh and snap of bone, heavy breathing. There is a visceral charge to this blackout that becomes a signifier of what Juan has been feeling all along, of the anger and despair that is masked by the passivity he shares with Eimbcke’s direction.

We follow the blackouts through various sounds and noises until the end of the film, which tracks its titular McGuffin to its sad conclusion. Lake Tahoe is a wonderfully centrifugal elegy.

(DVDs are available from Film Movement.)

We waited for our theater to open, a Romanian lady and I, chatting. She hadn’t been home for forty years, she admitted — not even since the end of Communism. Ceausescu (she spat the name like poison) had imprisoned her father for seven years. For what, she didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It went without saying, in fact, that her father had been innocent, and his imprisonment unjust.  It was the perfect warm up for the film we were about to see.

Police, Adjective. I was trying to get a handle on the film’s title.  How can “police” be used as an adjective? Oh, yeah — duh.  Police station. Police car. Police state. Hmmmmm, there’s a possible connection.   Police, Verb might have been an equally apt title, I mused, since the action follows a young cop who follows a suspected drug dealer — relentlessly.  The cop is as obsessive as Inspector Javert, and much less interested in the letter of the law than in justice — and on that distinction the film comes to turn. All Cristi the cop has on Victor the kid is an occasional hashish cigarette. One of the kid’s friends has turned informant on Victor — some friend: his motives seem dubious. All Cristi knows for sure is he doesn’t want to send the kid to prison for something that wouldn’t get him arrested anywhere else in Europe — and since Romania wants nothing so much as being part of Europe, the laws are bound to change. So Cristi follows — doggedly, patiently — hoping to settle things one way or the other. And so we follow, too, doggedly, hopefully as patiently, as Cristi silently watches and waits.

The film’s director, Corneliu Porumboiu, makes sly reference to his stubbornly stolid visual style in his 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), when a character is curtly ordered to put the camera on a tripod and leave it there. But if the camera work is plainspoken, the structure is wildly unconventional: half that film is a real-time talk-show debate — over whether a Romanian town actually had its much-celebrated anti-Communist revolution. Romanian comedy, like Scandinavian, is deadpan — black (though not as black) humor, toughened during decades under Communism and centuries under the Turk. A stoic absurdity as survival skill: that, and patience.

Christi’s depthless patience, his iron focus, keep Police, Adjective from being a comedy — despite lots of comedic touches.  The director moves the camera more,  since he is following a chase, but the aesthetic remains bare-bones, paralleling Cristi’s no-nonsense approach. Porumboiu, on the other hand, displays a wonderful flair for nonsense: the plot flow continually interrupts with baroque and even silly digressions, obstacles to Cristi’s forward motion that no American TV cop ever faced — in getting information from internal departments, from delays caused by his colleagues’ different work priorities and personal eccentricities, their conversations about the merits of cold remedies, of Prague versus Romanian cities, a messy clog of humanizing details.

“Why can’t we just go from Point A to Point B?” one can almost hear Cristi complain.  In fact, that’s pretty much what he says to his wife, Anca, in one of those side-tracks, an extremely technical discussion of metaphor and other literary topics.  Cristi asks why a songwriter, if he wants to say something, doesn’t just say it directly — instead of talking about fields and flowers.  In question is a schlocky internet love song his wife keeps playing.  For her part, Anca shows a professional level of expertise, expounding on pronominal adjectives and anaphoras with a chirpy, matter-of-fact precision. This conversation isn’t just another colorful digression, though.  For film, too, has its grammar, and Porumboiu employs some of the very rhetorical devices they discuss. Anaphora, for example, involves the repetition of a word sequence at the beginning of successive verses. In the film, repeated scenes of Cristi opening his office door and turning on the light effecta similar poetic rhythm. (Someone who knows grammar as well as Anca — and Porumboiu — might be able to identify other such parallels in play.)

Meanwhile, art isn’t the only dimension under consideration.  The relation of laws on the books (which he is presumably pledged to enforce) to larger notions of justice also trouble Cristi.  If some Romanian Academy can arbitrarily change the spelling of a word or define the rules of grammar, why should he stand by while some equally bureaucratic authorities ruin the life of some innocent to conform to some arbitrary legal standard?  Such thorny issues are hashed out in Socratic style with the lacerating humor of Aristophanes.   Cristi’s conscientious objections put him on the receiving end of a hilarious word studies led by his boss, who insists on going by the book (as in dictionary.)   This discussion of personal conscience as against some official standard make for a profound weaving of  form and content in Police, Adjective to generate an unexpectedly rich texture.

This film would make a great double feature with the first episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Dekalog series, the one where an overconfident language professor (who thinks a big enough computer could even compose poetry) is confronted with a mystery that no rational formula can master.  I’ve always thought it most significant that Kieslowski begins his investigation of moral reality with the implied question of whether ethics is closer to a science or to an art. Likewise, it seems significant that Porumboiu wants to talk about the nature of ethics using an aesthetic that regards his characters more than just vehicles for information.  Police, Adjective collides the poetic and prosaic to raise questions about the thickness of the ground on which we all stand — and offers another example of how Romanian filmmakers are enriching the grammar of cinema: by breaking the rules.

About Elly

How to discuss a film about which the less you know going in the better…  which may or may not get enough U.S. distribution to matter…  though if it does, you really should try to see… and getting you to do so may depend on someone like me convincing you to… without telling you too much… perhaps it’s nearly as difficult as getting certain kinds of conversations past the cinema censors in the Islamic Republic… so let’s do this indirectly.

Asghar Farhadi’s last film in the Chicago International Film Festival won the Golden Hugo in 2006, Fireworks Wednesday, a domestic drama set on the Persian New Year, punctuated by firecracker explosions, conveyed masterly in both image and sound.  In About Elly, the background matrix of metaphor and cinematic possibilities is the sea.  A group of university friends gather for a weekend in a beachfront cottage.  Depending on one’s perspective, the choppy sea in this overcast season is bracing or malevolent – in any case, it is always there, relentless, ambiguous, unavoidable.  Both About Elly and the previous film unfold a complex back-story, from multiple perspectives, in a non-linear way – foregrounding issues of narrative, truth, and their role in human relationships.  Marriage is central to both films — as a relationship of highest hopes and deepest pain.

The thing is, I think director Farhadi truly believes in both: he conveys joy and conflict with the freshness, openness and depth of his characters, often in small, telling ways.  He seems less interested in using human extremes as merely a foil for one another than in exploring a world where circumstances conspire bring out our best and worst — to get beyond the loss of innocence to being able to live meaningfully in the world that is.

I could tell I wasn’t the only one struggling to categorize this film, listening to people laugh nervously at moments they thought maybe made this a comedy of errors.  At other moments, the film seemed Hitchcockian, when Fate seemed to be settling an inexplicable grudge by crafting circumstances into a hall of jagged, broken mirrors.  I thought of Antonioni, a philosophical reference with rich and intriguing possibilities of contrast.  The Italian director captured a world which the loss of transcendence had rendered numb; his characters could live in the moment, sure, but at cost of utter disconnection.  Iranian cinema is a religious world – whatever else it may be or what outsiders may think of it, stories unfold beneath an intact “sacred canopy,” an overarching sense of moral transcendence that may actually turn out to be the primary requirement for unselfconscious community.

Indeed, one finds in Iranian cinema a certain social innocence in that has become hard to come by in the spiritually jaded West.  Yet Iranians are far from philosophically naïve: if Antonioni is trying to conduct life in a suddenly airless environment, the Iranians are working out their existential agonies in a society where there is still enough air in the room to maintain a certain centeredness.  Of course, existential agonies aren’t the only oppressions Iranians have to contend with, and feel a need to work out — even in the midst of them. The dicey politics of discussing politics in art under a totalitarian regime are one more avenue of interpretation for the film and the situations these characters struggle to make sense of. As always, simply raising questions about narrative-making carries its own subversive message in a regime where the Official Reality rules at gunpoint.

For Antonioni, making sense of life wasn’t even a concern anymore; in this film, finding meaning remains critical — even if there’s a certain self-consciousness about he unreliability of narrative and truth. I came away with the sense of the fragility of community, of relationships: how the abyss needn’t be existential to be bottomless, but that human nature has enough darkness to threaten our closeness with one another.

Favorite image: friends working together to push a car stuck in the sand on the beach.  Most intriguing image: the opening credits featured the dark, inside perspective of a – what?  a mailbox?  a ballot box?  The latter, of course, would be a most-pregnant image, given recent electoral controversies in Iran, which have been much on my mind.

By the close credits, I was ready to vote another Hugo for Farhadi (the film won Best Narrative Feature at Tribeca and Silver bear in Berlin) but it was only my first film of the 45th Chicago International Film Festival… which carries on for more than the next week…  nice to start with such a winner… but  I’ll try to get a sense of the competition and file some further reports here at Filmwell…