Counting features and shorts, the 38th Denver Film Festival will present around 200 movies. Some films, like Todd Haynes’ Carol or Sarah Gavron's Suffragette or John Crowley's Brooklyn come with reputations. Many others come unheralded; there are lots of them, and lots of them are good to see.
I think the jewel of the festival is the focus on the films of Poland, which is one of the fine national traditions in the cinema. Each year, the festival takes a special look at one national cinema, but 2015’s tribute goes a step further than other years. The Denver Film Festival has a long connection to Polish film, started by the festival’s co-founder and longtime director Ron Henderson.
Denver was one of the few places to show all 10 films of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue at one time. Kieslowski even came to Denver one year, as have other Polish directors and actors. For the 38th festival, there are a dozen films from Poland, and six filmmakers will appear in person. It’s a wonderful gift to the city and the area.
One of the Polish films, Karbala, is a war film set in Iraq, and its picture of the war is not what we typically see. We Americans forget that Poland has had soldiers in Iraq also, and the story of Karbala involves one small unit of Polish soldiers and another from Bulgaria, defending the city hall of Karbala against attacking insurgents. Some of the film looks just like American movies about Iraq – the soldiers wear the same desert camouflage and the fabric-covered helmets. The place has the same yellow-tinged coloring that signals the heat and dryness of Iraq.
American war films – no matter where they take place – tend to be melodramas. They present the soldiers as young and innocent, boys who are set upon for no legitimate reason, and the moralities of the stories are blunt and obvious. Karbala doesn’t allow that naiveté, and it’s not much interested in moralities. It just shows soldiers stuck in a mess. Some of them look young, but the movie doesn’t take on questions of innocence.
The officers, both Polish and Bulgarian, are tough in the eyes and grizzled in the face. The know that night-flying helicopters could rescue them, and that America has them, but America will not come to relieve these 80 men; they’ve got to fight their way through the battle with no outside help. Karbala does not pity these soldiers, but it presents their ordeal as a mark that Poland exists and that the country matters in the world.
There are other treats in this 12-day festival, of course.
The Italian director Nanni Moretti will present his latest film, Mia Madre, starring the American actor John Turturro. There’s a good new documentary called Hitchcock/Truffaut about a brilliant interview conducted over several days in 1962 by the then-young French rebel filmmaker Francois Truffaut with the great and established Hitchcock. The book that came from the interview is an invaluable and exciting read, and now comes this film.
The best thing about film festivals is not that they showcase some high-profile movies that will probably open somewhere in the area over the next couple of months. The best thing is that the Denver Film Festival is showing dozens of movies worth seeing that will never show in this area again.
For instance, Cemetery of Splendor is the work of a celebrated director from Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It’s probably the most ambiguous movie in the entire festival; it completely intertwines reality and dream. It’s a film of very long takes, repeated images – of water and spinning objects and people. It not only lets your thoughts wander – it makes your thoughts wander. The film opens in a hospital with rows of sleeping soldiers. And right off the bat, you enter the dream, that is sometimes yours and sometimes the movie’s.
It’s a stunning experience.
Download the film guide [.pdf] for the 38th Denver Film Festival