Film Festo

The Atlantic Film Festival has been on here, over the past week. This year, for (embarassingly) the first time ever, I actually got off my backside and went to see a couple of films. I'm very glad I did.

Friday night I saw Control, a biopic of Ian Curtis (who was the singer in the band Joy Division before his suicide in 1980). It was very good, excellently-acted, and filmed in black-and-white - which entirely suited its rather grim, working-class, Thatcherite setting in the north of England. Interestingly, I discovered that the film was based on a memoir written by Curtis' wife, and that she (along with the late, legendary Tony Wilson) served as one of the film's producers. Which makes sense, given that the film depicts her as the innocent victim of Curtis's philandering and confused ways.

Then yesterday afternoon, I went along to see a documentary by a Dutch filmmaker called Forever. I wanted see it because it's about the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, a place I have visited and loved (because I just like graveyards, anyway). The film turned out not to be quite what I was expecting, though. It wasn't really about the cemetery itself, but rather the many artists (both famous and non-famous) buried there, and the people who have loved them. The gravesite of each artist - Proust, Wilde, Modigliani, Chopin - served as a jumping-off point for the filmmaker to talk to the people who came there to pay their respects. The results were very beautiful, emotionally revealing, and incredibly touching. Far from being morbid, the film was a celebration of life, and the reverberations of human existence long after the body itself has turned to dust. I loved it.