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Denver Film Festival 2016: Your License To Try Something Strange

James Dimagiba
/
Denver Film Festival
The Denver Film Festival is huge. Take a chance on something strange.

Film festivals were made for movies like Granny’s Dancing on the Table, and if you like a good dose of despair in your films, you’re especially in luck.

Credit TriArt Film, Nordic Film Factory
Granny's Dancing on the Table, directed by Hanna Sköld

It’s a Swedish picture, told in retrospect by a young girl, then woman, who lives in isolation in the wilderness with her unhappy father. From time to time, he takes a stick to her, or his fists, then smoothing her hair and cradling his head in his hands in despair afterward. Director Hanna Sköld makes the fields and hills look grim; there’s no respite from the unhappiness which the girl relates in a dead monotone. She escapes her present into an imagined world depicted in stop-motion animation with dolls, which is no happier than her live-action experience.

The dolls do have some wit to them, though – barely-defined mouths, oddly shaped heads. The grandmother doll sits under a mass of unruly gray hair with rimless eyeglasses cocked at an odd angle over her face and nose.

There’s a category at the Cannes Film Festival called “A Certain Regard.” In French, it means films that have a certain look to them, something interesting. Although Granny’s Dancing on the Table can be inscrutable, it certainly has that certain look.

Credit Black Sheep Film Productions Ltd.
One Week and a Day, directed by Asaph Polonsky

Israeli film is quite good right now. Many of their pictures have to do with war and terrorism, but Asaph Polonsky’s One Week and a Day is about grief, and the movie comes in the disjointed, unruly shape that grief takes. The title refers to the first day after the end of the Jewish week of ritual mourning called Shiva. It’s the time for mourners to return to their normal lives, but for the parents of a young man who died – of cancer not war – that’s not easy. It’s a bumpy ride, sometimes devastating, sometimes funny. The father loses his moorings. He smokes dope with a goofy young neighbor, gets in spats with older neighbors and argues with the staff at the hospice over his son’s blanket. It takes a young girl with a sick mother to help him find his way.

Adam Irving’s Off the Rails is one of those films that keeps growing in your mind. At first, it looks like one more minor documentary about an amiable eccentric, but by the time the film ends, it’s led you to think about law and justice, social tolerance and public safety, among other things. The subject is a man named Darius McCollum. At the time the film was shot, McCollum is about 50 years old and he’s been imprisoned dozens of times for driving buses and subway trains. He’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and he has an irresistible obsession with public transportation.

He’s good at it; he knows how the New York subway system works. He knows where the trains are parked and how to get into them. He knows the schedules. As he’s demonstrated too many times, he’s a good, safe driver. He has even put on a supervisor’s uniform and directed safety and maintenance procedures. And, as he appears on camera, he’s a gracious, gentle, capable man. He just is not trained, certified or employed to do these things, and that’s problem.

Credit Gemini Pictures
Off the Rails, directed by Adam Irving

Attorneys, social workers and psychiatrists love him, and so does the woman who wrote a book about him. But the film – gently – takes you past your love of McCollum’s delightful and amusing need to drive trains and buses. The question comes up constantly – what to do with him. A district attorney says that McCollum breaks the law, endangers the public and should go to jail – but prison hardly seems the answer to this sweet man. It’s suggested that the transit system hire him, but people legitimately worry if he’s reliable.

Eventually, Off the Rails makes the point that our large, complicated, highly organized society has no idea what to do with human beings who don’t fit its categories.

The Denver Film Festival is huge. Take a chance on something strange. 

Editor's note: Coverage of the Denver Film Festival will continue in next week's column.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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