Hunger is the first feature film by Turner Prize winning British Video artist Steve McQueen. It took the Caméra d’Or prize at Cannes, honoring outstanding work by a first time director. The film is gut-wrenching, but not without tact. Political themes are deeply explored, but Hunger avoids being overly preachy. The film follows the true story of the last six weeks in the life of inmate Bobby Sands, a hunger striker and member of the IRA. Because it’s based on actual historical events, it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the film does not have a happy ending.

The structure is somewhat atypical. The film opens by following a prison guard through his daily routine, which includes powerful, slow shots of him dipping his bloody knuckles in water after beating inmates. Pensive, nearly silent scenes gradually add together to give the viewer a chilling picture of the facility and the abuses occurring there.

The camera then begins to watch the travails of a new inmate upon his arrival. He is stripped naked, refusing to don a prison uniform as part of a protest to be recognized as a political prisoner. The film continues with wordless long takes. Two prisoners in a tiny cell, walls smeared with human waste. Cleverly discreet exchanges of contraband during family visits. Body cavity searches. Brutal beatings.

More after the jump.

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“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”

These were some of the first words out of moderator Annette Insdorf’s mouth, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.

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The biggest budget movie ever made in Romanian history played for free at Telluride 2008 today. Nae Caranfil is the central figure of the current Romanian film renaissance (they call him “The Dean”). The Rest is Silence is a period piece loosely based on the true story of Grigore “Grig” Brezianu’s determination to create of the first epic Romanian movie and establish cinema as an art form. The War of Independence (1912) is about the Romanians war with the Turks, made about 35 years after the fact. According to Caranafil, the monarch at the time offered Grig 80,000 soldiers for his production.

It’s Bucharest in 1911. Live theater reigns supreme and movies are just shy of an opiate appealing to base instincts and keeping lower class citizens out of live theater houses. Drama schools only enroll those who can best impersonate the nation’s “heroes of history.” Grig (Marius Florea Vizante) is a 25 year old movie director whose theater actor father is ashamed of him. The big french studio, Gaumonde, has set up a shop in Romania and catches wind of Grig’s “film libretto” about Romania’s war of independence. The famed actor Belcea was Grig’s only advocate and shot at making the movie, but he’s dead and Gaumonde wants to steal the story. Grig runs to get the help of Leon Negrescu (Ovidiu Niculescu), an eccentric tycoon who believes God mandated him to bring arts and sciences to Romania (he wears a toga and conducts art classes). But first Grig has to convince Leon that film is worthy of his patronage. …Read more

Irish filmmaker Cathal Black, known for making movies that fluidly mix fact and fiction, documentary tropes and dramatic technique, has maybe found his ultimate subject in Thomas Lynch. Lynch, who describes himself in Black’s Learning Gravity as “a father, a husband, an undertaker,” is also a renowned poet and essayist whose writings inspired Alan Ball to create his HBO series, Six Feet Under. In the film, Lynch says his poetry grew out of a desire to “leave a record” for his children of what was going on in his head while he appeared to be “staring at your ear, preoccupied.” Poetry, he says, is his way of making his subjective interpretation of his life, work and family into something concrete, an “effort to act out in language those most unspeakable feelings.” It’s a philosophy and practice tailor made for Black’s hybrid style.

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There just aren’t enough movies about old people. O’Horten is a Norwegian film about the title character coming of age, but this coming of age story takes place when he’s 67 years old, on the eve of retiring. Directed by Bent Hamer (Factotum), it’s a revealing movie about the quietly tumultuous transition in life with a soft name: Retirement.

The movie opens with Odd Horten (Bard Owe), a 40 year veteran train engineer, waking up to his morning routine, which is just as mechanical as the train station he reports to each day. Helming the engine, he drives his train in and out of dark mountain passages opening to the stark landscape of Norway in winter.

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Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky begins as a leisurely yet engaging character study, seemingly unconcerned with a traditional conflict/resolution narrative. Sally Hawkins’ performance as Poppy, a bubbly, sarcastic, and endearing elementary school teacher is a delight to watch. An hour into the film, I pleasantly resigned myself to enjoying it as a disconnected series of episodes. This could have been annoying, if not for the stellar performance by Hawkins. Her comedy and breezy demeanor nearly covers Poppy’s immaturity and apparent fear of commitment, while still giving us a glimpse that something more lurks beneath all the giggles and quips.

The character is so delightful, in fact, it almost comes as a surprise when conflict eventually erupts between her and her driving instructor Scott, played by Eddie Marsan. It’s a marvel that the animosity between these two characters, and the eventual resolution, is so well-rendered, considering how late it appears in the film. This is by no means sloppy filmmaking on the part of Leigh. On the contrary, he has perfected a sort of inverse method of story telling. Whereas normally we are dumped into a narrative-in-progress and bombarded by exposition to let us know who the characters are supposed to be, Leigh takes his time, building his characters first, then letting the drama follow.

When I asked him if the conflict between Poppy and Scott was part of the initial concept of the film, he said, “No…you explore and develop, and out of it comes the drama. It can’t be there at the beginning because you have to have the characters there before you have the drama.”

More from Leigh after the jump.

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Telluride is celebrating a great talent coming out of Kazakhstan this year, Sergei Dvortsevoy. Although he’s here with only his first feature film (which, incidentally, took four years to make), there’s a slate of documentaries he’s brought that the festival directors tout as “must sees.” In the Q&A for his first feature film, Tulpan, Dvortsevoy described shooting the first scene of the movie, a 10 minute long take of a ewe giving birth. He showed it to his small cast of Kazakh actors and non-actors and said, “That’s what we have to live up to.” And it’s true. If there were a Best Non-human Actor Oscar, this sheep would have it (although the Academy would probably give it to one of these damn Disney chihuahuas). Fortunately, the cast lived up to the animal’s authenticity with each scene and breathed life into a simple fable.

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Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor, who screened short films at Telluride in 2005 and 2006, brought their debut full-length work to the festival this morning. The 74-minute Helen was preceded by Joy, a 9-minute short featuring some of the same actors, settings and situations, which Lawlor described before the screening as “a slightly more philosophical primer” for the feature. The filmmaking duo place both works within the context of their Civic Life series, “community-based” films cast with local non-performers, in which the socio-economic issues relevant to modern England and Ireland are improbably but successfully folded into a pure cinema marked by long traveling takes, atmosphere in place of action, and a notable economy of speech.

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Prodigal Sons aroused a bit of a frenzy in Telluride leading up to its first screening on Friday––with a line around the block an hour before the screening, many pass holders were turned away––and no doubt in part due to the Orson Welles factor. As per the Festival program notes, in the film director Kimberly Reed, who “once was a male named Paul,” revisits her “tumultuous relationship” with her adopted brother Marc “and chronicles Marc’s discovery: he is the grandson of Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.”

But Sons is hardly the exploration of starry ancestry that the logline might lead you to believe, at least not in much of a direct way. Though Reed does travel with Marc to Croatia, where he appears in another documentary and bonds with Welles’ ex-girlfriend Oja Kodar, ultimately she’s less concerned with Marc’s geneology than in his unlikely status as anti-social “other” in a family in which he’s the only sibling without an LGBT identification.

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