Florida Film Festival 2013: Day 6

A solid slate of films on Wednesday started with Joe Swanberg's All the Light in the Sky. Based largely on her own experiences in the industry, Jane Adams stars (and co-wrote the movie with Swanberg) as Marie, a 45-year-old woman struggling to navigate having a career in a business where the more she ages, the more her presence is devalued. It's a performance stripped of all vanity and, in typical Swanberg fashion, merely documents his characters without any sense of flare or pretension.

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The WWII drama Lore tells its story from the little-seen position of the children of Nazi parents. When those parents are captured by the Allied forces, 15-year-old Lore is thrust upon the role of caretaker for her younger siblings and her journey is as much a discovery of harsh realities as it is one of finding safety and shelter. Along the way, she encounters a young man with whom an uneasy partnership (I won't say why) necessitates each of their escapes. It's a decidedly and necessarily unsentimental look at this girl (an outstanding Saskia Rosendahl) and harrowing look at the struggle to survive when everyone around you is seemingly an enemy, including your own past.

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I ended the night with the emotionally disturbing South Korean film from Kim Ki-Duk, Pieta. Kang-do sadistically cashes in on insurance loopholes by crippling poor factory workers (but not killing them, because that complicates the financial process he says) who have outstanding loans owed to his boss. He destroys poor family after poor family unceremoniously until a mysterious woman appears at his door, claiming to be the mother who abandoned him at birth. More psychodrama or existential thriller than pure horror film, Pieta still has some gruesome and scary set pieces, highlighted by Kim's uncanny and unsettling camera work.