Great news to start off the day. My favorite film of the festival, GREAT WORLD OF SOUND, has been announced as the Grand Jury Prize Winner and will get an encore screening on closing night.
Bad news: I was unable to see RESERVATIONS or LA VIE EN ROSE, both films I had been anticipating. Also, the films I did get to see were not very good.
The first was AMERICAN FUGITIVE: THE TRUTH ABOUT HASSAN, a fairly stale documentary that talks about David Belfield, a man wanted for murdering an associate of the Shah of Iran in 1980. He immediately fled to Iran where he remained in hiding until 2001. That was when Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Mahkmalbaf cast him in his film KANDAHAR. The American press picked up on his appearance, and director Jean-Daniel Lafond travelled to Iranto interview the man now known as Hassan Abdulrahman. This is certainly a very interesting subject for a documentary and that carries the film a long way. Hassan is a very interesting and intriguing person, and is very candid in the interview segments. Unfortunately the film is very dry, rarely rising above the level of a decent episode of Dateline NBC. The moments that stand out the best are when the filmmaker interviews Hassan's family and the victim's brother. This is the only time the film explores the human effects of the murder. The rest of it is just a series of scenes where Hassan and others spout off on American foreign policy in the Middle East. There's nothing wrong with that, but such a unique subject deserved a more original treatment.
The next film was THE INSURGENTS, a film so bad that I was infuriated that I had arranged my festival schedule so I could see both it and BLOOD CAR. THE INSURGENTS is about a group of left wing radicals who plot to blow up a building. The group is led by Robert, a college professor played by John Shea. He recruits the group, which we see develop through a non-chronological narrative structure. These scenes are pretty painful to sit through, particularly when Robert indoctrinates Hana. As played by seemingly medicated Juliette Marquis, Hana comes across as a very stupid woman who is easily manipulated by Robert, and when she spouts off political stuff it comes off as something she's memorized. Mary Stuart Masterson shows up as a government operative who has a past with Robert. Given the ending, her character is supposed to have some importance to the story, but she only appears in a handful of scenes and Masterson seems pretty bored. The connections between the characters that are supposed to set up the ending do not come across at all during the film. Writer-Director Scott Dacko is particularly terrible with actors, unable to even coax decent performances from veterans Masterson and Shea. His (award winning, he will tell you) screenplay contains some pretty awful dialogue and lame attempts at political debate. This is one of the worst films I saw at the festival.
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