Containing movies like the animation “Tess has a stain on her dress” and the feature “Janna & Liv” program #9 is another highlight of the festival. It will be screened again tomorrow, November 20th at 17:30 pm.

A napkin being written on and wandering from table to table causes a good deal of confusion and some trouble in a small American coffee shop. Jac Woods’ “A Simple Taste” is an amusing film with sympathetic characters and a great punch line.

Lenny

Pubertal confusion is the topic of Cyril Amon Schaublin’s feature “Lenny” about a boy, Anton, who is fascinated by a pretty, young girl’s video-blog on YouTube. The film is set in minimalistic urban landscape that perfectly reflects the loneliness of the two characters. “Where are we if we’re not in front of the screen?” is the question that asked the director himself when he started working on that movie.

A little girl being confused by the strange behaviour of her family is shown in the animation “Tess has a stain on her dress”. After eating strawberries Tess has a red speckle on her dress that makes her mother, her brother, her grandmother and her father presume she’d had her period for the first time. They all react in distinct ways but exaggeratedly in equal measure. Only a little boy at her age sees the stain as what it really is and gives her a chocolate bar to daggle her dress a little more. Director Eran Flax painted 3.000 single pictures for that 4 minutes-animation.

In “The Slaughter” director Crt Brajnik reverses a pig slaughter from pressing minced meat into sausage casings back to the pig being tied up by farmers. Crt grew up on a farm himself but had never dared to watch a slaughter before he made that movie. He’s been a vegetarian since. “This is not an industrialised slaughtering. The people I showed in the movie have raised the animals they eventually kill,” the director says. “I don’t want to say that killing is unnormal, I just think it should be done responsibly.”

For quite a while I haven’t seen so much drinking and puking and spitting as in “Mentally Fat”. It delivers an unsparing image of the Finnish working class youth, the two main characters being hard-nosed and pragmatic. It’s a great film though, straightforward and unadorned. “If you make a movie about 20 years-old people from the working class in Finland and don’t portray them drinking, you’re lying,” director Antti Heikki Pesonen says.

Janna & Liv

And then comes Therese Ahlbeck’s “Janna & Liv”, an impressive movie about two pregnant women who unintentionally end up in the same car and get into a chain of problems until they give birth at almost the same time. Not only delivers the movie convincing arguments for using contraceptives but also tells a round and diverting story. Simply loving it!