Less is More
Year: 2005
Running time: 105 mins
Svyato, Russia 2005
Director: Victor Kossakovsky
In Russian with English subtitles
33 minutes/DigiBeta
Worldly Desires, Korea 2005
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
In Thai with English subtitles
40 minutes/DigiBeta
Roads of Kiarostami, Iran 2005
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
32 minutes/DigiBeta
Three of our favourite filmmakers dig deep in films of limited duration and modest resources. Victor Kossakovsky’s (
Tishe!) sublimely simple
Svyato records two-year-old Svyatoslav’s first encounter with a mirror, and documents something fundamentally true about human ‘self-cognition and loneliness’. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (
Blissfully Yours,
Tropical Malady) focuses on his own predilection for filming in the Thai rainforest jungle in
Worldly Desires. By day, a young couple searches the jungle for a sacred tree; by night, a film crew shoots incongruously poppy song-and-dance routines. It’s an idiosyncratic and playful film about the mystery of being happy and in love. In
Roads of Kiarostami the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami combines poetry, classical music and his own distinctive photography of roads. The camera follows paths on the still photographs and then opens up to the surroundings, questioning what means most to us: the path we take or the beauty that surrounds us on our journey? A very gratifying programme indeed, and refreshment for the long-distance Festival-goer.
