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Jakarta Post

Film festival: Of spies, Sweden and nick cave

The Europe on Screen (EOS) arrived May 1 in Jakarta, back for its 15th iteration and presenting 62 films from 21 nations

Alex O. Bue and Sophie Woodrooffe (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sat, May 9, 2015

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Film festival:  Of spies, Sweden and nick cave

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he Europe on Screen (EOS) arrived May 1 in Jakarta, back for its 15th iteration and presenting 62 films from 21 nations. The range of options offered has been huge, ranging from Dutch thrillers to Spanish travelogues. As the festival heads into its last weekend, here are three picks for cinemagoers to enjoy.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared


Considering the film'€™s unwieldy title, you might think that the humor in this Swedish comedy was lost in translation. Far from it.

Directed by Felix Herngren, the rollicking film follows Allan, a centenarian, who escapes the drudgery of a retirement home in search of one more escapade.

Channeling Forrest Gump, the ostensibly ignorant man bumbles his way through serendipitous events and encounters with a bevy of historical figures over the course of his life (in this case, Franco, Stalin and Oppenhimer, to name a few).

Life is no box of chocolates in the film, however, as Allan adheres to his mother'€™s advice that '€œthinking will get you nowhere'€ and her last words, '€œLife is what it is'€.

Much of the film is wry and slapstick, with an array of macabre deaths and timely explosions alternating with muted one-liners and blaring polka horns. A caper involving a suitcase full of money, some hapless gangsters and a befuddled police officer '€” not to mention a circus elephant '€” round out the absurdist plot.

 

Citizenfour

Director Laurs Poitras traces the events behind the initial meeting of Poitras and Glen Greenwald with Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on the US'€™ global mass surveillance program.

Lovers of Watergate-style conspiracies will revel in the espionage-tinged narrative. Poitras captures the paranoia-saturated atmosphere over the course of eight days in an upscale hotel in Hong Kong.

Poitras'€™ minimalist style lets her camera do the grunt work of telling the story, showing us eerie vistas of surveillance bases, communications collection sites and data storage facilities around the world.

 

20,000 Days on Earth

The film literally commemorates Australian musician Nick Cave'€™s 20,000th day on Earth by filming the whole thing, from waking up to sundown (his bedtime is later than the movie allows).

Cave is nearly 55 and comes attached with endless epithets: Nick Cave of the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave of The Birthday Part, the rocker, the '€œpsycho-sexual'€ preacher, the guy who uses '€œpsycho'€ as a suffix and the novelist.

The list grows longer over the course of his day. Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard wrote the film, with Cave, as a documentary-musical. A scripted documentary is another word for fiction '€” '€œOr is it?'€ '€” tapping one of Cave'€™s favorite themes: the ways we '€œwrite'€ our own lives.
Director Forsyth and Pollard delight in de-weirding the weirdo, and the way we read into Cave'€™s character is significant of their '€œtruth and falsity are relative, man'€ theme. Is he weird or not? Is that hairdo eccentric, or the most normal in a sequence of weirder cuts?

On film, Cave is mild-mannered, and you begin to wonder if that magnetic stare isn'€™t cover-up for a greater depthless-ness. Then he mounts the stage, honks that big baritone and suddenly women'€™s hands are palpitating up towards him.

For more information, visit europeonscreen.org.

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The writers are interns at The Jakarta Post.

 

 

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