Culture critic Chris Vognar is at the Venice Film Festival participating in a panel discussion on the Biennale College, a higher-education training workshop for the development and production of micro-budget feature-length films. He will be reporting from Venice for the next week.
So what exactly is this Biennale College program I keep referring to? It's actually very cool: Four years ago the Biennale di Venezia created a laboratory for advanced training dedicated to the production of low-cost films that could be written, shot and edited for 150,000 euros (a little over $167,000 at today's exchange rate). Every year they select three films to show on the massive stage of the Venice Film Festival.
All three of this year's films focus on young people in peril, though they could scarcely be more different in style and tone.
In The Fits (above), a young black girl (the superb Royalty Hightower) trains with her older brother to be a boxer. But she's enthralled with the dance team that practices down the hall, and soon she's making inroads to becoming hoofer. Her timing coincides with some scary goings on: One by one, the older girls on the dance team are suffering from violent seizures that can't be explained. Director/co-writer Anna Rose Holmer lets the sense of mystery linger as she focuses on the grace and athleticism, the camaraderie and competition that quietly takes on a Salem-like quality of contagion. The Fits unfolds in a vivid and self-enclosed universe; it's a highly assured American indie feature.
Baby Bump is a stranger kind of animal, but no less resourceful or innovative. It plays like something a young David Lynch might have made were he an angry Polish kid. A plot summary does little service to the film's abstract imagery and Cronenberg-like bodily horror, some of which also manages to be darkly satirical. Mickey (Kacper Olszewski), the eleven-year-old at the center of Baby Bump, endures life as a series of humiliations and bizarre Oedipal encounters with his single mom (Agnieszka Podsiadlik). His name is Mickey, so naturally his alter ego is a cartoon mouse. But there's nothing cute or cuddly about the rodent, or about this surreal slice of adolescent angst. This is precisely the kind of experimental fare that needs festival exposure to gain an audience.
The hero of Blanka is also eleven, and her life is also a grind. But the style of Kohki Hasei's debut feature owes more to the neorealism native to this country than to any masters of the macabre. The title character (Cydel Gabutero) is a Manila street kid who hustles to get from day to day. She steals a little here, begs a little there. Blanka, who possesses a formidable pout/frown, forms a bond with a blind street musician, runs with some fellow kiddie criminals and tries to avoid the city's thriving sex slavery market. Hasei strikes a fine balance between sentimentality and squalor, and the film ultimately reaches a redemptive climax that doesn't feel forced.
The Venice Film Festival is a pretty glitzy affair, with stars and formal wear aplenty. But the Biennale College realizes that the future of cinema will only be as strong as its most talented young voices. These three films have something else in common besides a theme of at-risk youth. They all manage to do a lot with a little, through skill in visual composition, sound, editing, and most important, overall vision. I admire all of them, and I look forward to discussing them at the Biennale College panel on Tuesday.
