Film Fest 2021

 The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Fest never disappoints, though, like fishing for muskies or visiting the casino, you can't expect to hit the jackpot right away.

The number of entries might have been reduced from previous years—it's hard to tell because the short films are listed along with the features—but there are still far more offerings here than most viewers are likely to see in a week. Hilary and I have seen only eight films since we got back from Ely. In case anyone is in the mood for a film on a rainy Saturday or Sunday, here's a brief rundown, starting with the winners.

https://mspfilm.org/festivals/mspiff/

Luzzu tells the story of Jesmark, a Maltese fisherman with a sick child and a leaky boat. But he also has friends, and a stolid determination to continue in his solitary profession, although the fish populations are declining and the EU is encouraging independent fishermen like him to take a generous bailout and find other work. 

His wife, who was raised in an affluent environment, would like him to get a job on a trawler to insure the steady income required to pay the doctor bills. He considers that a sell-out; the trawlers are the ones who are ruining the fishing in the first place. The plot becomes more intricate as Jesmark, who's hard-working but taciturn and somewhat naive, begins to learn more about bribery and corruption in the local fishing industry, which extends from whose catch gets auctioned first at the daily market to the nefarious sale of illegal fish.   

Balloon, set in the high altitude valleys of Tibet, depicts the daily life of a sheep-tending family. The landscape is stark and there's plenty of almost random movement, but the atmosphere is refreshing as we follow the activities of Dargye, his ever-cheerful wife Drolkar, their two young sons, and Dargye's aged father, who mostly sits around reciting Buddhist chants. 

The ethnographic material is worth the price of admission, but as the days roll past and the couple's third (and oldest) son is brought home from boarding school by Drolkar's sister, a melancholy Buddhist nun, several thorny issues develop having to do with balloons, Chinese family planning policy, and reincarnation.  

    

The narrative line of Under the Open Sky is easy enough to describe: former Yakusa gets out of prison and has trouble reintegrating in society. But it would be a mistake to describe the film as some sort of polemic about injustices met up with by ex-cons, as many reviewers have done. The central character, Masao Mikami, is a complex character—vaguely charming, slightly naive, independent by nature, liable to speak his mind, and prone to explosions of violence when he witnesses acts of injustice or intimidation. Upon his release he gains the support of a sponsor and a social worker, and is soon receiving welfare benefits. If he's eager to find work, it's only because he hates to sponge off the government. Unfortunately, the only thing he learned how to do in prison was sew aprons.

But Mikami has soon been befriended by the owner of the grocery store down the block, and a young screen-writer also takes an interest in his story. From these elements director Miwa Nishikawa spins a tale that begins to feel long at the one-hour mark, but picks up speed again as Mikami regains his social bearings, with flashbacks to his troubled youth and to the trial that sent him to prison adding additional  layers of complexity to his character. A final undercurrent surfaces when Mikami decides that he wants to locate his mother, a geisha who abandoned him at the age of four.

Also worth a look:

Co-op Wars, a locally produced documentary about the early days of the food co-op movement in the Twin Cities, when hippies sparred with Marxist-Leninists and disputes about whether to stock brown rice or Coca Cola led to violent warehouse takeovers.  

Asia, which follows the intertwined but often independent lives of a mother and her adolescent daughter who suffers from a degenerative muscle disease.