IRINA - THE STORY OF US

Every once in awhile, you see a movie that gives you hope, again. Hope that movies can be more than spectacles, can be about real people with real problems in real places. It's a hope that started a long time ago when you first saw The Grapes of Wrath, then continued with Bicycle Thieves, Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, Bitter Rice, Two Women (yes, Italian filmmakers created a mother lode of realistic films) Norma Rae - you get the idea. Movies that move us and tell a story about us.

Now, you can add Irina to that list. A Bulgarian movie made by first-time feature director Nadejda Koseva, written by Ms. Koseva, Svetoslav Ovtcharov and Bojan Vuletic, Irina tells the story of a young mother, Irina ( Martina Apostolova), with her baby boy living in a cramped house in a poor village, struggling to keep her family going. Her husband, Sasha ( Hristo Ushev),  is unemployed as is Irina's sister, Ludmilla ( Kasiel Noah Asher) who lives with them.

One day, the roof falls in - she gets fired from her job and when she gets home early discovers her husband having sex with her sister. That same night, her husband has a terrible accident in which he loses both of his legs. We are in a world where things like this happen. It's the real world inhabited not by good guys and bad guys but by people who are sometimes good and sometimes bad.

Director Koseva, in a conversation after the showing of Irina, said that the inspiration for making this movie was her experience having a child several years ago when she realized that, contrary to accepted belief, women were not only men's equal in strength, they far exceeded men. Irina proves her resiliency when, desperately seeking a way to make money, she turns to being a surrogate mother for a wealthy couple ( Irini Jambonas and Alexander Kossev) who have their own brand of problems.

There are no chases, no one has super powers to surmount their everyday problems of finding money to eat, coal to keep warm and a place to call home. The best these characters can hope for is a chance to be forgiven and to forgive.

Irina, its creators and cast have won awards in film festivals all over the world and now have won both the audience favorite award and the judges award as Best Film at SEEfest 2019.

This is not some obscure vision of life in the 21st Century, but a timeless tale of one woman's quest for a better world for her family and herself. In that quest, in her journey, all of us can see our own.

SEEfest's 11th Annual Business of Film Conference 2019

Movies are art, or can be, but movies are also a business and like the song says about Love and Marriage, you can't have one without the other.

 This year at the lovely Villa Aurora, the South East Europe Film Festival held a conference about a growing aspect of the film industry - using data to market and, maybe, to create movies.

 The Villa Aurora is located in the Pacific Palisades. Built in the 1920s as a kind of model home for the Palisades area which was undeveloped at that time. In the 1940s it was purchased by German immigrants and became a meeting place for many German artists who fled to Hollywood from Nazi Germany.  Today, it is an artist residency and hosts art-related events throughout the year.

 So, it was a very fitting place to discuss the state of filmmaking today and how modern methods of data collection are being used to market movies. SEEfest brought together film makers, film producers, market managers, film buyers and academicians to discuss the role of data in moviemaking.

 The Romans use to cut open a bird and seek some knowledge of the future by reading the bird's entrails. Today, we have more modern methods, we cut open data.

 In case you missed it, you are being tracked. Not only does Big Brother know every place you visited on the web, it knows every search you made, every product you bought (for those few who still shop in stores, you probably pay with a credit card or are a member of some 'rewards' group whose actual purpose isn't to reward you for shopping at a certain store, but to gather information about you). Every supermarket, drug store, clothing store, book store, etc. keeps detailed information about you and your purchases. You are known not only by what you buy but, also, by what you look at.

If you have ever bought a stock or mutual fund, you know that past performance is not predictive of future success. So, you can look at all the data you want and still make a bomb of a movie. Did anyone predict that a fantasy story about dragons and walls would be one of the most successful TV series ever made? How about the story of a bunch of toys that come to life when not being played with?

 Today, previewing a movie isn't about placing it in a movie theater in a representative area to see how the audience reacts but, rather, getting a few dozen people wired with sensors then showing them the movie and seeing what they react to metabolically. Of course, that will only tell the moviemakers how a person is reacting to a movie, but not what brought that person into the movie theater to that particular movie. For that, more sophisticated data is required. The future has each of us being monitored 24/7 by a chip in our brains. Oh no, you say, it will never come to that. What if you were offered free movies for a year? Free popcorn? How about a free month of Netflix?

Sheri Candler, social media advisor with The Film Collaborative believes that each filmmaker must be passionate about her film if she hopes to see it gain an audience. And the target audience is often a mirror image of the filmmaker, herself.

 Raoul Marinescu, a VP, Revenue Partnerships at Pluto TV, summed up much of the discussion when he said that extensive data analysis is done by Pluto TV concerning what its customers want to see, yet, still they are surprised when certain shows become very popular.  Data is only good as its interpreters.

 Vera Mijojlić, SEEfest's Artistic Director, closed the discussion with a look at how international film, with subtitles, are becoming more accepted by the American audience and she envisions a future in which festivals like SEEfest will partner with a platform like Pluto to bring films from or about South east Europe into the American home.

 The rest of the week at SEEfest is teeming with extraordinary movies. I'll be looking at my choices with a new perspective - why did I choose this movie?

THE DISTANCE BETWEEN ME AND ME

Directors, Mona Nicoară and Dana Bunescu, in The Distance Between Me and Me have given us a vivid portrait of the poet, musician, intellectual, and committed communist Nina Cassian who lived in Romania from her birth in 1924 until she was forced into exile in 1985. More than that, their film shows us the conflicts between an artist, seeking to expose the world around her, and the government of her country, seeking to cover up that same world.

Romania after World War II became a dictatorship under the influence of the USSR. The film shows Cassian being interviewed during this period and also appearing in a state-sponsored film where she appears at a gathering of factory workers and discusses her poetry. The 'workers' express dissatisfaction with her poetry and all modern poetry as being too difficult to understand, even to college educated workers.

Cassian tells us, in the lengthy interview done with her by the filmmakers in the United States toward the end of Cassian's life. She reveals that 'metaphors' were banned in Romania for many years. She explains that she was forced to turn to writing music since, she explains, the censors did not know what to make of a major C or minor C - did major C mean freedom or was did it mean that there was a longing to be free?

The film examines the files of the State Security apparatus that kept her under surveillance for years. Many people urged her to flee, but she refused since Romania was her country and she loved it, just as she loved Communism which she believes never existed in Romania or the USSR.

The Distance Between Me and Me is more relevant today than ever. It shows us what can happen to a country that has embraced 'alternative facts' and how art can save what is left of the truth in such a country.

South East European Film Festival (SEEFest) - 2019

Have you ever been to a movie festival?

If you live in or around Los Angeles, you have the chance to go to several every years - and one of the best is the South East European Film Festival (SEEFest) running from May 1 to May 8 at various locations throughout the city.

South East Europe has been the pivot of Europe for many centuries. The conflicts in this region sparked World War I with the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in 1914. At the end of World War II, much of the region came under the control of the USSR. When the USSR collapsed, it throw the region into chaos.

This year’s festival, the 14th, will explore the theme of cinematic audacity by drawing attention to South East European filmmakers whose works grapple with complex existential, ethical, and historical questions in innovative and provocative ways. DO NOT LET THIS SCARE YOU - the movies may be about complex subjects but they are all entertaining - and will bring you to a world worth knowing.

SEEfest presents internationally acclaimed films, art installations, film retrospectives, literary salons, and other events. The festival begins with the Opening Night Gala and ends with a Closing Night Gala, and in between enjoy a variety of shorts, documentaries, feature films, and special screenings.

Festival passes are now on sale and provide entry into all films and events during the eight-day festival. SEEfest Cine-Fan members enjoy a 20% discount on season passes and single tickets.

This year’s SEEfest theme art design is by Elyas Beria.

More information is available online: seefilmla.org.