In this program some very impressing movies were shown, such as Benjamin Freidberg’s “Guided Tour”, Aiden Prewett’s “Me, Myself and iPod” and Emma de Swaef’s “Soft Plants”. If you have missed it: sorry, no chance to watch it again at the festival. Anyway, here is a short overview.

An elaborate, perfectly made portrait of a young single man living in Jerusalem, “Guided Tour” by Benjamin Freidberg is a particularly strong movie with beautiful pictures of the city itself. The main character Eitan works during the night painting lines on the streets. In his free time he tries to find someone to talk to on the phone at a dating hotline and eventually gets in contact with a woman whom he tells his stories. The film delivers an intense insight into the character of a person meandering between the so called reality of every day life and his own imagination. In the end we find out that we cannot really trust our guide: most of his stories were made up. “Jerusalem is a very fragmented city with lots of walls,” Benjamin tells. “It is full of ideas and religions living separately, and it really makes you think about your own identity.”

After that the Michael Moore-style documentary “Me, Myself & iPod” deals with another identity crisis. The protagonist – the director himself – is trying to get over the addiction to his iPod. It is centered around the concept of the ego, by focussing on the idea of “my music” on “my iPod”. The film is full of creative, hilarious scenes, and it’s definitely fun watching.

Ask Gummo!

The special topic continues with a depressed frottee-puppet in Samy Challah’s “Ask Gummo!”. Life hasn’t been good to him recently but Gummo tries to keep the faith. After a one night-stand with a frottee-fetishist he is shocked realising that his right arm has been eaten, and in the end he discovers an inconvenient truth about his own identity. He draws the only logical consequence and closes with the statement: “I will think you all to pieces!”

Another great movie is “Away” by Chilean director Jorge Fried Budnik. The spectator takes the perspective of a voyeur watching the daily life of an Argentinian couple in their flat from behind walls or through windows, getting annoyed by the persistent sound of a messenger on the girl’s laptop. The film finishes abruptly with a shock: the man kills his girlfriend by throwing a paint bucket. Jorge: “When I went to the film school in Buenos Aires it was very fashionable to shoot long short films without any action, which I found really boring. I wanted to make fun of that.” And why did it all have to end in violence? “Well, while I was studying my girlfriend moved into my little apartment in Buenos Aires, and that kind of must have inspired me.” No worries, the girl is alive and well, and they’re still together.

The story of another murder is told in Magnus von Horn’s disquieting film “Echo”. Two murderers are confronted with their deed during a reconstruction of the case. A not heart-warming but definitely exceptional movie displaying a sociopathic personality.

Soft Plants

The program finishes with Emma de Swaef’s “Soft Plants”. It might seem like an animation film, but in fact it’s a documentary about the escaping fantasies of office workers, the director explains. She actually studied documentary at the Sint-Lukas University in Brussels but soon discovered that she had much more fun creating artificial landscapes from wool. “Soft Plants” is her graduation film and “somehow I managed to convince my professor again that I was doing a documentary.”  Whatever it might be, it’s a felicitous work.