Picture Europe

I’ve got to say I am really enjoying this film festival. I can arrive at the last minute & still get tickets; what a huge difference from the Berlinale. I’m not sure if this is because the concept of sub-titled film here seems absolutely so foreign to Spaniards or just that the advertising here was poor. But the selections tend to be what serious critics might judge as the best films from each of about a dozen European countries over the last year. For someone interested in immigrants, Kicks was really well done — incorporating a nearly impossible number of perspectives from people on all sides — to really bring home how prejudice is little more than a lack of imagination.

It’s also funny that I finally got to see Shoppen, the German film on speed-dating which was all over Germany while I was there but my German was and will certainly never be good enough to watch German film. So I am here listening to German (my distant third language if that is not even too grandiose a term) and reading subtiltles in my very good second. Nice to keep the old noggin at work. I will launch into a short review of the French speed-dating film at the Berlinale, La Fabrique des Sentiments (of which, by the way, no one in the audience had ever heard when I mentioned it in the post-screening discussion). OK, well, it’s not a sophisticated film audience here, but who cares as long as the films arrive. SUBTITLED.

The French film was nicely existential — using speed dating as a forum to showcase female alienation within modern society. Do we want an education, career, love, family? Are any of us really super-women enough to have it all? Or do we even really want it all? Is it simply as someone once told me, that we marry whoever we’re with at the age when we’re supposed to get married and we have children with whoever we’re with at the age we’re supposed to have kids? The German movie mainly used the idea of speed dating as a platform to present some really snappy, smart, funny male-female dialogue. Frankly I found it so perceptive about people and women in particular that I had to ask myself, who on earth is this German director/writer?? Good stuff; Picture Europe venues rotate year-by-year, and I’ll be looking out for a venue nearby next year.