Nguyen also had the funny Crush the Skull in this year's "Midnight Shorts" program, which was the strongest one the festival has had in a few years. Other great (and totally disturbing) shorts included: Skinfection 1: My Main Squeeze (of which I'll say nothing more than it involves the popping of things); Brains?, a nice little inversion of the zombie movie; Love, a short about a one-night stand that leads to a quite strange reproductive conclusion; and Bariku Light, about a man left to his own devices while watching pornography that pushes things to its logical and unsettling extreme.
Seeking Asian Female is a very strong and complicated doc about, as the title suggests, the phenomenon of white American males trying to find Asian brides through the internet, or as director Debbie Lum--herself of Chinese descent, but raised thoroughly American--likes to call it: "yellow fever". In her search, she finds Steven, a 60-year-old divorced man in San Francisco who for years has been carrying on long-distance, online relationships with Asian women when he finally finds "the one". That one is Sandy, from a small town in China, who surprisingly and somewhat mysteriously moves to the states and agrees to get engaged to Steven. Increasingly, Debbie finds herself directly in the middle of Steven and Sandy's relationship, who are often reduced to using Google Translator to have a basic conversation. But Debbie ends up being more than just a translator and her involvement in mediating the relationship becomes as much of a subject in the documentary as anything else. Thus it poses some real ethical questions as to the role filmmaker has in the depiction of the subject of his or her movie. In the end, though, it's a warm and charming film and I think more an exploration of how co-habitation works than an exposé on mail- or internet-order brides.
While many of the narrative features I saw during the preview weeks leading up to the festival didn't really impress me on the whole, the first two I screened were gems that got the week off to a good start. Andrew Mudge's The Forgotten Kingdom follows Atang, a tough, chain-smoking Johannesburg twenty-something who must bury his just deceased father in the far off mountainous Lesotho. What follows is an almost Odyssean journey, as Atang visits, leaves, and returns again to his rural beginnings. He falls in love with old schoolmate and befriends a self-sufficient young orphan who posseses the "eyes of the dark clouds" that follow Atang everywhere. The film is a collision of wildly different styles: realist family drama, pastoral spiritual journey, broad road comedy. Yet it somehow coalesces into a moving portrait of rediscovery, mainly on the shoulders of its great performances: Nozipho Nkelemba as the lovely and soulful Dineo; Lebohang Ntsane as the resourceful and relentless young orphan; and Zenzo Nkqobe, who gives Atang a Humphrey Bogart-like charisma under the hard and stoic surface.
Broken is one of the most assured films of the festival, a story about Skunk (Eloise Laurence, a revelation in her debut role), a young diabetic in a dreary British suburb and the people who populate her world. The title necessarily refers to the broken characters (both physically and psychologically) and their lives, but it's also a reference to some of the film's structural approach. It's a very smart and engaging film that, similarly to The Forgotten Kingdom, manages to easily mix drama and comedy.
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