Diff? Isn’t that some sort of differential device in a car which allows each of the driving wheels to rotate at different speeds, while supplying each with equal torque?
Eurm, ja, if you lived on the Bluff, or in Mulder’s Drift. The Diff, or Durban International Film Festival, started on Wednesday and will screen 93 feature films, 48 documentaries and 60 short films at 25 venues around Durban over the next 10 days.
Any gritty oil-under-fingernails neo-realist portrayals of mechanics servicing cars, then? Well, there are some road movies, including the Mauritian film Benares, which follows two young boys on a “dreamy journey” to find prostitutes.
There is a strong Iranian and South Korean presence at the festival. Festival manager Nashen Moodley believes “Korea is one of the most vibrant and exciting film-producing countries in the world right now.”
The Diff will present five Korean films this year, including Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, which completes director Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, following Joint Security Area and the widely acclaimed Old Boy.
Of the Iranian films, Jafar Panahi’s 2006 Berlin Silver Bear-winning Offside is a comedy about football infatuated Iranian women who disguise themselves as men and sneak into a World Cup qualifying match. Offside follows Panahi’s showing of The Circle and Crimson Gold at the Diff. The director — a pioneer of the Iranian New Wave — will be attending the festival along with fellow countrymen Abolfazl Jalili (Full or Empty) and Mohammad Rasoulof (Iron Island).
Female football fans, boys chasing after hookers — sounds like a bit of a wank? This is the most staid Diff in years. Even Larry Clark, the purveyor of salacious cinema, has come up with his most tender film yet, Wassup Rockers. Focusing on a day in the lives of a group of Latino teenagers from the ghettos in South Central Los Angeles, it explores issues of teenage disaffection, racism and social violence. Clark just manages to rouse himself from his initial masturbatory stupor — which sees the camera fixated on beautiful pubescent boys taking off their shirts to skate, play music and sexually experiment with girls — to increase the pace in a film that, despite some painful first-time performances from the cast, is ultimately both humorous and poignant.
Clark, who spent three years hanging out with the kids in the film, attributed his camera’s early fixation with their jailbait bodies to “the organic way the film developed” and the fact that they are the “nicest bunch of kids I’ve encountered”.
“Nice” isn’t an adjective associated with the following films: The Elementary Particles, Oskar Roehler’s adaptation of controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq’s novel Les Particules Elementaire (Atomised); director Michael Haneke’s Cache (Hidden), starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as a couple who receive sinister, secretly shot footage of themselves and their family; Manderlay, the follow-up to Lars von Trier’s Dogville; and United 93 from director Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday and The Bourne Supremacy), which tells the story of those on board a flight hijacked on September 11 2001.
Guinean director Gahite Fofana’s lyrical Un Matin Bonne Heurre (Early in the Morning) is essential viewing, and is based on a true event when teenage stowaways on a plane to Europe freeze to death. It sensitively captures the disenchantment, boredom and desperation of African youth.
Cineastes will have the opportunity to watch Bengali director Satyajit Ray’s 1958 film, Jalsaghar (The Music Room), while a Diff regular from that region, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, returns with Kaalpurush (Memories in the Mist).
Moodley says local director Khalo Matabane’s feature-length debut, Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, is astounding. An examination of physical displacement and South African xenophobia, it “ingeniously uses non-fictional elements in the telling of a fictional story”.
Non-fictional and fictional elements in one film? What happened to the dear old doccie? Well, there are 48 of them and, for the first time in its history, the festival opened with one — An Inconvenient Truth from director Davis Guggenheim. It follows former American vice-president Al Gore’s powerpoint campaign to inform the world about the catastrophic nature of global warming.
Israeli director Avi Mograbi’s Avenge But One of My Two Eyes examines the role of myth in conditioning Israeli society. There’s Samson, and the retelling of the events at Masada in 72AD when zealots committed suicide rather than surrendering to Roman forces. The movie focuses on the Palestinian reality of humiliation by the Israeli army and the daily, depressing restrictions on life.
Journalist and the Jihadi counterpoints the life of Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl (who was kidnapped and beheaded) with that of jihadi activist, Omar Sheikh; John and Jane contextualises the effects of globalisation, following six call-centre workers in India who sell to an American market. It is humorous despite its occasional fatalism.
So, what not to mention?
Eurm, Jerry Bruckheimer, the World Cup (unless you’ve just watched Offside) and “nice”.