TIFF - DAY8

Renaissance (Christian Volckman)
A film noir with outstanding visuals, imagery and a innovative -japanese-style- animation technique (in the same lines of Sin City).

But don't expect more, the innovation concerns the style, everything else is either snatched (Blade Runner more than any other film) or just blindly borrowed from "The Film Noir Template": straightforward one -liner dialouges (English accent in Paris 2050's!), typical sterotypes (v.s. characters development) , simply put all the people are divided into:
Good guys: Rebelious good cop, cute dame with killer French legs with an odd English Accent, missing girl (a cocky and stuckup scientist, which oddly is the cute dame's sister but more looks like English Rachel) , other good but insignificant cops who are pretty much "fillers".

Bad guys:evil corporation (Avalon) gang, invisable Avalon security guys and other which are there to create suspense.
Overall a movie with stunning cinematagrophy but a plot as thin as a pizza crust.
















Mainline (Rakhshan Bani-Etemad)
Another gritty and blunt film by the Queen of Iranian Cinema. After her last movie "Gilaneh" (shown at last year's TIFF), a film on the post-war era life in Iran, she return to her favorite subject (something she's been working on for years in documentaries): drug addiction, but this time as a feature, this -by the way- is the first Iranian feature movie about drug addiction in this format.

Casting her own daughter (Baran Kowsari) as the main character (who delivers a jaw-dropping stunning performance) and shooting in destaurated tones and documentary style (hand-held camera, fast paced cuts, fly-on-the-wall style), the film is a powerful depiction of an epidemic among the middle class Iranians. The movie is well balanced in terms of looking at the life of young drug-addicts from all angles and perspectives, their struggles, dreams, short-lived joys and their doomed fate.

Daring as she always is, Bani-Etemad aims stright at the issue without any compromises, she barely leaves any stone unturned and gives you a brutal glimpse of a life of a drug addict in a wealthy upper-middle class in Tehran.

Bita Farahi gives a heart-wrenching performance as the worrisome suffering mother who's on the verge of a mental breakdown, as she rides the emotional rollar-coaster of a parent trying to put up with her daughter's unorthodox life and getting her off the drug and dealing with the sense of guilt and blame for what her daughter has become.

This is not a movie for the faint-hearted, it's an intense and challenging ride (the mood of the is very similiar to Jafar Panahi's "The Circle" ), but real as it gets and Rakhshan's best work in her repertoire of commentaries on contemporary Iranian social issues. Issues that no-one else can portray like she does.