Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival

[Lydia Leftcoast]

I bought a ten-ticket pass, and so far I've seen four films, one each from Uruguay, Japan (of course!), Finland, and Iran.

I've reviewed each one in the Entertainment and Pop Culture Forum:

Seawards Journey A sweetly comic road movie from Uruguay, about four elderly men who venture out of their isolated provincial town to see the sea.

The Soup One Morning Japanese, and the only dud so far. A young couple is cohabiting in a dreary apartment. The man is slowly going mad and being drawn into a cult. His gf pleads with him and tries to talk sense into him. This gets very old after a while, although the director has an excellent visual sense.

Upswing A Finnish yuppie couple tries to one-up the other yuppies by spending their vacation not in Switzerland or South America but role-playing as long-term unemployed people in a public housing project. At first you think you're in for a cute comedy about cultural clashes, but a surprising plot twist turns the story 90 degrees. My favorite so far.

Bitter Dream An old and bitter Iranian man earns his living preparing corpses for burial and abusing and berating the other cemetery workers. He starts hallucinating prophetic images on TV and is convinced that the Angel of Death is after him. An unusual amount of humor for such a grim subject.

I'm planning on a double feature tomorrow (Saturday) night: the other Japanese film The Taste of Tea and a German film about teenagers in the immediate postwar era called Edelweiss Pirates. For next week, I'm looking at films from Thailand, Sweden, Kazakhstan, and maybe the Philippines.

Unfortunately, unlike Portland, where all the venues are within easy walking distance of one another, the theaters are in four clumps (the U, Uptown, the Riverview, and some auditorium in St. Paul), so scheduling isn't easy.

[katinmn]

1. I'm bummed I've had to miss the whole festival

These sounds like great films.

I love watching foreign movies. When I was in college we had free foreign films every Wednesday night.

I'm glad you're taking them all in!