Florida Film Festival 2013: Day 4

I started day 4 with the inventive French film, The Painting, was nominated at this past year's César Awards for Best Animated Film and deservingly so. The initial conceit is that the characters in a particular unfinished painting are socially stratified--the Alldunns (i.e., "all done"); the Halfies, who are partially finished; and the Sketchies, who are exactly what they sound like. There's an obvious hierarchy here and, for a kid's film, it's a particularly clever parable. But the film isn't satisfied with staying in the world within this particular painting and the story wonderfully opens up when three of the main characters jump out of the frame into other worlds and other paintings. It's a truly uplifting and magical film with the kind of imagination only the best of animated films provide.

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The documentary of David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, Downeast, takes place in a small Maine coastal town hit hard by the current economic climate. --- has plans to use an old sardine cannery and turn it into a lobster facility. He has managed to get the townsfolk on his side (many of whom lost their jobs when that cannery closed) as well as be granted federal funds to launch the project. But when the local selectmen, who in some cases also happen to have competing business interests to a new lobster company coming in, --- is met head on with challenges. When other financial complications arise, the new company, which was starting to thrive, begins to hang tooth-and-nail just to keep afloat. As specific as that setting is, it speaks to the larger and unsettling times that hit many town across the country and the folly of the American dream

Music docs are common here at the festival, but rarely are they as exhaustive as Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, which chronicles the highly influential yet shamefully unsuccessful power pop/alternative band. Like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards, the engine of Big Star’s creative vision laid in the hands of frontman Alex Chilton and the overshadowed Chris Bell. Seemingly before they began, the original incarnation of the band fractured, with Chilton becoming the main creative force going forward. But as tragedy informs many of music’s greatest bands, their legend only continues to grow and the film is loving in its tribute to them.