Over the 10-day period from July 23 to August 1, the 31st Durban International Film Festival (Diff) unleashes more than 200 screenings at various venues around the city. That’s 20 screenings a day, which represents a retina-ripping challenge far too arduous for even the most hardened cinephile.
That is where the fine art of judicious selection comes in. The most highly anticipated moment of the year among Durban’s sizeable contingent of film junkies is when they finally find themselves clutching the bible known as The Programme and then begin the exquisitely excruciating task of picking through the cavalcade of features, documentaries, shorts, workshops, seminars, markets and forums to map out their itinerary carefully for the upcoming movie marathon.
It’s like being utterly famished and then being placed before the world’s largest buffet brandishing a single plate.
For the lovers of classical cinema there’s the Ingmar Bergman retrospective. Yet it is on the selection of cult contemporary cinema that the majority of attention is placed. This year’s Diff lines up no fewer than 72 feature films from just about every country on the planet, many of which enjoy their world premieres here. Four of the most original voices in contemporary film — those of Michael Haneke, Todd Solondz, Harmony Korine and Debra Granik — have their new films in competition at the festival.
Haneke, whose previous works include Funny Games and The Piano Teacher, has an uncanny knack of impaling audiences on his subtle cinematic apocalypses, which, with agonising austerity, reveal the darkest shadows of the human condition. His most recent film, The White Ribbon, depicts a nameless dread slowly suffocating a small village in pre-World War I Germany and has been hailed as the director’s most harrowing and brilliant creation.
Solondz, whose crushing parables of American urban ennui take place in his films Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness, Palindromes and Storytelling, offers up a fresh batch of bleakness and humour so dark it swallows light in Life During Wartime. The film picks up the pieces of the Jordan family that was so spectacularly shattered in Happiness and furthers the director’s relentless misanthropy through favourite themes such as race, suicide, autism, sexual misery, self-hatred, terrorism and paedophilia in what many critics are calling Solondz’s boldest effort yet.
After the revelation of Larry Clark’s groundbreaking Kids, which Korine wrote, the latter has forged an erratic career with the polarising Gummo, the mesmerising Julien Donkey Boy, the incomprehensible Mr Lonely and now Trash Humpers, a perplexing collision of nihilism, depression and Dada that only Korine could have concocted. A gang of masked miscreants, including Korine and his wife, embarks upon various demented missions, from destroying televisions with sledgehammers to killing dolls and — yes — humping trash. The film has been described as “completely appalling and utterly gripping” and “a descent into another world: beautiful in its determined ugliness and like nothing you’ve ever seen”.
Another highly acclaimed Stateside film is Winter’s Bone, Granik’s wrenching tale that New York Magazine called “the year’s most stirring film” and Entertainment Weekly described as “one of the most true-blooded epics of Americana you’re ever likely to see”. The tense, naturalistic thriller won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Festival and follows 17-year-old Ree Dolly as she confronts the local criminal underworld and the harsh Ozark wilderness to track down her missing father.
For the full smorgasbord of cinema on offer, visit www.cca.ukzn.ac.za and begin the tortuous discriminations that determine what you will succeed in balancing on your plate. Bon appetit.