MEIFF 2009

We pick the eye-catching films from this year's MEIFF Discuss this article

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10 to 11
Pelin Esmer is one of Turkey’s most promising young directors. She tells Time Out why her latest film strikes a chord close to home
Turkish director Pelin Esmer arrives in the capital on a high. Her debut feature film, 10 to 11, scooped a slew of awards in Europe and now it comes to MEIFF with the anticipation of doing the same. It is the story of passionate Istanbuli collector, Mithat, who is forced to enlist the help of the concierge of his building to save his collection from destruction. Pelin admits that it is a character deeply inspired by her uncle: ‘He is one of the most interesting men I have ever met. I made a documentary about him to get closer to his world and his idea of collecting in 2002, but this only led to more and more questions in my mind.’

For the film, she needed a foil for Mithat’s eccentricity; it comes in the form of the concierge, Ali. ‘He is a totally different man from a very different background, a different world with different dreams,’ she says. ‘In their relationship the issue is of a search for security in life: where we search for it, why we fight for it. In the film, Mithat finds it right in the heart of his collections; for Ali, it is in a life with his family, from which he has long been separated. They search for the same thing but find it in different places.’

It marks a stark departure from Pelin’s previous effort, Oyun, a documentary following a group of rural Turkish women who set out to put on a village play. But this was never an issue, she says: ‘Of course filming this was different from the documentary experience – I had a script and both limited time and money; this brings with it stress, but also more control.’

She also believes that the two are not so different in spirit. ‘In both films, my characters are struggling because they are genuinely different, not because they want to be different but because they are – and they have to pay for it in life. They are brave enough to choose and fight for what they want. I have great respect for those people in life.’ It is something she clearly associates with: According to Pelin, filmmaking requires similar qualities and ‘a metabolism for not giving up’. If so, 10 to 11 is a truly fine vindication for her efforts and a genuine contender for the festival.
Gareth Clark
Cinestar, Oct 9, 9.45pm; Oct 11 (3.45pm)
Star Pick

Son of Babylon
Iraqi filmmaker Mohamed Al-Daradji found inspiration close to home for his new film Son of Babylon. He tells Time Out Abu Dhabi why it’s a film everyone should see...
So what’s Son of Babylon all about?
It’s about an Iraqi woman from the north who travels with her grandson to the south (Baghdad) after the end of the Saddam’s regime to search for her son, who has been missing since 1991.

Being from Iraq yourself, have you heard similar tales?
The story was inspired by my auntie. She had lost her son in the Iraqi-Irani war and we don’t know what happened to him. He was taken by the Iraqi Special Intelligence Police, or someone, and when I was a child, whenever we’d have a happy occasion – a wedding, birthday or anything – I would see my auntie, my mother and the other women get together and cry. I was so small, I always wondered what happened. In 2003, I was walking on a street in Baghdad and I heard in the news about a mass grave discovered around Babylon. I listened and thought about my auntie, then I wrote this story.

Is sounds like a very personal tale…
This is not just a movie. We talk about people I know, friends and family, the millions of people gone missing in the last 40 years in Iraq; there are still people going missing now. This story has been forgotten in the past four years because of the chaos that’s happening in Iraq. We talk about 275 discoveries of mass graves after the fall of Saddam. We talk about 400,000 unidentified bodies discovered in Iraq for which there is no laboratory to identify their bodies. I call them the forgotten genocide.

In making your last film, a number of your crew were kidnapped or imprisoned. Is it easier to film in Iraq now?
It is difficult, but it was better this time. We worked with the Iraqi Police and army. I had a foreign team, though, and we had to go to Baghdad. The British left early, the French said they’d stay, but the French embassy decided to take them out because they thought it was dangerous with it being around election time. So, in the end, I was left with just my Iraqi crew.

You mention the election, but you avoid politics in your films. Is this not difficult to achieve?
It is very difficult. What happens in Iraq is a lot of media is funded by political organisations and all of them have certain agendas. When you see the film you will see there is no political agenda. There is no mention of politics, just a human story. There is no difference between Kurd and Arab, Shia and Shiite, because all of these people have been affected by the pain of war and occupation. It’s not anti-Saddam or anti-American, or anti anyone. For example, you see a Kurd walking together with an Arab woman: they don’t share the same language, but they share the same suffering, y’know?
Emirates Palace, Oct 9, 6.30pm; Cinestar, Oct 10, 4pm
Star Pick

Frontier Ghandhi: Badshah Khan, a Torch for Peace
Dir Teri McLuhan
Teri McLuhan explains why it took 21 years to bring her film to the screen
It’s taken a long time for Teri McLuhan to piece together the life of Badshah Khan – by reputation, Pakistan’s answer to Ghandhi. He is a figure still not widely known in the West but, at his height, he commanded 300,000 followers leading non-violent resistance against British rule in India.

McLuhan stumbled across him, reading a book on his life back in 1987: ‘I had read only two pages when all of the electrons started shifting around me,’ she recalls. A year after this, Khan died. At the time there was heavy fighting in the Afghan war, but both sides ceased fire to allow his burial, Teri explains. Two decades later, she has finally brought his life to the screen in a mixture of interviews, documentary footage and dramatic reenactment.

But why so long? The reason for the wait was ‘fear’, she says. Oddly, not the fear of travelling to Afghanistan as a Westerner, which she did many times, but the fear that comes from a lack of knowledge. ‘Remember, in those days, hardly anyone had heard of Peshawar, let alone Jalalabad [where Khan is now buried].’ A Nobel Peace Prize nominee, his was a life full of incident, although, unlike Ghandi, he was actually once jailed by Pakistan’s authorities for his relationship with India. ‘He sacrificed all and gladly so, he once said. Here was a figure who was born Pashtun and into a warrior culture on what is now the Afghan/Pakistan border, and who has now put the planet on notice.’ With many of this year’s festival chronicling the effects of war and occupation, McLuhan’s documentary surely reminds us this isn’t something new, but that there is also a better way. A powerful work.
Gareth Clark
Cinestar, Oct 13, 6.45pm; Oct 15, 3.30pm

Red Riding Trilogy
Dir Julian Jarrold, James Marsh, Anand Tucker
Originally made for British TV, this might seem like an odd choice for the festival, but this trilogy of feature-length films, adapted from David Peace’s novels, was widely hailed as a masterpiece when it was originally shown on TV. The story follows three men (Sean Bean, Paddy Considine and David Morrissey) looking into the Yorkshire Ripper case over the course of nine years. Epic in scale, Red Riding Trilogy is part gritty noir, part morality tale, and a compelling, if emotionally gruelling, collection.
Red Riding 1974, Cinestar, Oct 9, 10pm; 1980, Cinestar, Oct 10, 10pm; 1983, Cinestar, Oct 11, 10pm

The Men Who Stare at Goats
Dir Grant Heslov
The gala screen’s closing-night film (for invitees only), journalist Jon Ronson’s caustic investigation into the US army’s adoption of New Age psych- ological techniques developed in the early ’80s and revived for the conflict in Iraq, makes a rocky transition to the big screen. Ewan McGregor plays the Ronson character, renamed Bob Wilton, who, having been dumped by his wife, decides to prove himself by heading to the Middle East in search of a story. Through a series of contrivances, he finds George Clooney’s reactivated ‘psychic spy’, Lyn Cassady, who believes he has been summoned to the Iraqi desert for a new, secret mission. Grant Heslov has gone Coens-esque on the direction front, often lunging for the quick, deadpan laugh to the detriment of the grim subtext. Ronson’s story was about paranoia and the desperate lengths that certain governments will go to in the name of national security. This is about a bunch of crazy stuff at which we can all chuckle. As that sort of movie, it works just fine.
David Jenkins
Gala: Emirates Palace, Oct 17, 8pm

The September Issue
Dir RJ Cutler
Vogue VIP Anna Wintour slinks through this highly entertaining vérité documentary like a stoic, sunglasses-bedecked doll. Director RJ Cutler follows Wintour and her staff as they plan the September 2007 issue of the magazine, which is still the largest (in terms of both size and sales) in the publication’s history. The people on display here are neither lionised nor criticised. Cutler just lets them be – and so our interest lives or dies on how fascinating we find the world they belong to. Indeed, once you’re hip to Wintour’s approach (cruelly cold and distant in the office, benevolently cold and distant at home) she becomes a fairly monotonous presence. The doc’s breakout star is Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, a former model whose frumpy clothing belies her genius for fashion. She counters her boss every chance she gets and provides a much-needed emotional centre.
Keith Uhlich
Emirates Palace, Oct 9, 9.30pm; Cinestar, Oct 10, 7.45pm
Star Pick

Wild Grass
Dir Alain Resnai
Now in his late eighties and over six decades after he made his first film, French director Alain Resnais shows no signs of having lost any of his artistic audacity. Taken from a novel by Christian Gailly entitled The Incident, his latest film explores how one small, seemingly trivial event – the theft of a woman’s purse – can lead, by the most improbable and digressive of routes, to something comparatively very substantial and significant: a matter, in fact, of lives and deaths. The purse in question belongs to dentist Marguerite (Sabine Azéma) and it is found, devoid of money and cards, by Georges (André Dussollier), who we presently learn is undergoing a particularly dramatic mid-life crisis. What’s it all about? Ageing, passion, doubt, love, pain and the whole damn thing. As light as a soufflé, yet bittersweet as chocolate, this feels like a summation of all the best things in Resnais’ career.
Geoff Andrew
Cinestar, Oct 14, 6.30pm; Grand Cinema, Oct 15, 4pm
Star Pick

Valentino: The Last Emperor
Dir Matt Tyrnauer
Tyrnauer tracks Valentino and partner from the preparation of Valentino’s 45th-anniversary collection in 2007 through a massive tribute to his career, while rumours swirl that the new corporate bosses are trying to push the brand’s creator into retirement. It’s also a bittersweet portrait of the end of fashion as art and of supreme luxury as an aspirational construct. In Valentino’s era, gowns could command top dollar because they were sewn by hand to exacting aesthetic specifications; now, middle-class shoppers can get a piece of the highest-end brands via belts and perfume. Enough said.
Karina Longworth
Cinestar, Oct 9, 7.15pm; Emirates Palace, Oct 12, 4pm