2010 Haifa Film Festival – The Winners

On every closing night of the Haifa Film Festival I get a little depressed. It is my favorite week of the year and I am so sad when it ends and I have to say goodbye to all my festival friends and go back to reality. It gets harder with every year.

This year I broke my record and saw 28 films at the festival. And if you followed Spliced coverage you must know that most of them were good.
Today, before the screening of the closing film The Town, the festival’s winners were announced:

Golden Anchor Competition – Mediterranean Cinema: Kosmos (dir. Reha Erdem)
Filmmakers of Tomorrow – FEDEORA Competition: A Somewhat Gentle Man (dir. Hans Petter Moland)
Best Israeli feature: Mabul (dir. Guy Nativ)

In the next couple of days I will write my own summing up post about the festival.
Until then, I’m gonna get some sleep…

Outside the Law (2010) theatrical review

Outside the Law aka Hors la loi is to represent Algiers at the nearest Oscars. Two years ago I saw the then Oscar nominee, Masques, a lovely comedy of errors. Don’t remember coming across other Algerian films since, and it’s a shame – looks like they have good cinema there.

The film centers on three brothers who suddenly find themselves at the heart of Algiers’ struggle for independence in the late 1950s. Yet this is rather the Algerian version Once upon a Time in the West or The Godfather: Part II (a number of scenes are borrowed directly from there) than The Battle of Algiers or Bloody Sunday. It’s a crime epic complete with long coats and dark streets, rather than a film chronicling political demonstrations and police brutality (though there is some of that too).

Outside the Law begins great, yet loses focuses as it progresses. The beginning plunges us into a chaotic world where justice is nowhere to be found, and the lead characters who oppose the law are no saints either.  Some of them act like bastards on more than one occasion. Too bad that it soon grows stale and clichéd. The production itself is impressive, and it shows that much talent went into it, but lack of cohesion and focus in terms of script and ideas work to enfeeble this film.