Playing Columbine

The Raindance lineup has now been fully announced, and the schedule should be up on the website in the next day or so, leaving me some time to go over some of my high points from what I’ve seen so far. I’m going to kick off with Playing Columbine, a documentary by Danny Ledonne that I caught at Montreal’s Fantasia this year. I don’t think its played any other major festivals yet, but I know Raindance will be its UK debut. The film looks at the controversy surrounding Ledonne’s own online game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, based on the infamous 1999 high school shootings, which provoked a media uproar in the US when the press first cottoned on to it. Is there any more to the game than a sick cash-in of a terrible tragedy, especially given the role video games were alleged to have played in creating such killers? Ledonne himself certainly thinks so, and uses his documentary to explore the current state of the video gaming and its so far neglected potential.

Chuckie Egg

I’m not much up on the current state of the gaming industry. I did spend a fair amount of my teenage years trying to master ZX Spectrum games such as Manic Miner and Chuckie Egg. I even wrote and released a couple of my own at one point, selling them by mail order through my company Celerysoft, and was flabbergasted to discover a few years back that someone had even bothered to archive my first release, Space Detective online (although they miscredited me as James Sharp, and yes, before anyone points out the obvious, it is a bit crap, but I was only 15 at the time). Technology moved on at such a pace that I rapidly couldn’t afford a new computer, and I was not to return to have anything to do with the gaming world until some 10 years later, when I wound up working for a short stint on Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic.

This remained something of an isolated blip in my IT career, most of which was spent working on databases in such riveting fields as the metal and telephone directory industries, but I could see by this time that computer games had certainly come a long way since my involvement with them, as the whole world was waking up to around this time, with the first Tomb Raider title making more money than that year’s multiple Oscar winner The English Patient. Games were being developed with a narrative complexity that could far outstrip any film offering, and the graphics were catching up too. I immediately hurried out to investigate further, and bought a game called Half Life. It was aptly titled too, as for the next six months, outside of working hours, I barely left my flat. I literally had half a life, at least until I finished the game, when I was left curiously deflated and with a feeling that perhaps my time might have been better occupied in other ways.

Ancient Domains of Mystery

I’m not going to get snotty about computer games, as I do actually really enjoy them, a little too much perhaps. The fact is I have a rather addictive personality and little enough time as it is to get the things I need to do done. When I do have a free moment, I’d rather spend it away from staring at a screen. I did relapse a couple of years ago, with a fairly well-known online RPG called Runescape, but in recent years, my main bit of gaming extravagance is taking out my friends in the Attack! game on Facebook. Until after watching Playing Columbine, that is, after which another Fantasia viewer confessed a similar ambivalence to the gaming world as me shortly before insisting I check out something called Ancient Domains of Mystery, and I ended up back in the same rut all over again. What I will say though, is that ADOM, a Dungeons and Dragons-styled RPG with decidedly low-fi ASCII graphics, reawakened a slightly nostalgic conviction in me that, as with cinema, the content is far more important than presentation.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

In this respect, Playing Columbine seemed like a documentary tailor-made for people like me, curious about the game industry but still trying to retain a critical distance. Its director, Ledonne, despite having created such a notorious title, is not a gaming geek, and in fact is now involved in wildlife documentaries. His basic thrust is this – that nowadays PC and games console hardware have evolved to such a level that there’s no limitations in what you can do in the field, yet if you’re comparing the development of the gaming industry with that of cinema, we’re nowhere  around even the Birth of a Nation mark. Whereas cinema soon realised the leap from prose to poetry, major games manufacturers are still making the same type of product – sports simulations, 3d shoot-em-ups, racing games, RPGs etc – as they always have, just improving the graphics and the sound effects and making them bigger and better.  There is still nothing in the way of an equivalent of an established “arthouse” genre for computer games. However more absorbing they get, they’re predominantly still stuck in the mode of diversions or distractions, and their potential for education or reflecting on the wider issues of the world have not really been explored. This is not the first time such concerns have been raised. I remember back in the 1980s, a games designer called Mel Croucher, responsible for titles such as Pimania (1982), the early multi-media title Deus Ex Machina (1984) and iD (1986) voicing similar frustrations. The bottom line though is the games industry is still very much an industry, and with its huge overheads, it cannot yet afford to be as creative as it might.

Cloud

The other point Ledonne makes, seemingly crucial when considering his own game, is that while computer games may not encourage violence, they often don’t ask you to do anything other than consume it passively. For all its technical limitations, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! did make you aware that the little sprites you were zapping on the screen were in fact representative of something else, and thus if anything, it made you more not less empathetic with the victims of the shootings. What is really revelatory though is that there is a small indie sub-industry emerging, making films not necessarily for money, but with artistic ambitions, aimed at making you think a bit. There’s a whole wad of them covered in this film – an Italian game about paedophile priests chasing choirboys, young lads in Darfur running around in search of food and clean water, and a rather more poetic-looking title called Cloud, which I’ll have to give a go sometime when I have a moment to spare.

My end impression is that there’s a whole lot more to gaming discourse than I was really aware of, and it points towards some really interesting directions that the field may develop in. Just as animation shouldn’t be constrained to emulating reality, video games too have the potential not only to explore different themes or make one aware of what’s going on in various other parts of the world, but to  break away totally from their roots to explore new forms of their own. When or how this will happen remains to be seen, but certainly it is clear from the perspective of those of us who work in film, we ignore this new medium at our peril.

I’ll end with a link to a great little diversion, which I heard about on the Today program on Radio 4 this morning, the online game Sock and Awe, where everyone gets a chance to play their favourite Iraqi journalist.

Love Exposure

I’ve been champing at the bit over the past few weeks waiting to announce the titles being screened at this year’s Raindance, but now I’m just about to do it, it seems the programme announcement might be overshadowed by another piece of Raindance-related news, namely the banning of this year’s festival trailer. Don’t want to dwell too much on this, as the powers that be have given their reasons in a letter that can be read here. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think this represents something of a sense-of-humour failure from the guys who once had us all singing along “Baba, baba, baba ba, bababa” before the screenings started, and fails to view the trailer in the spirit intended. Anyway, I’ve written already in my Grotesque post of August 19th about the futility of censorship in the internet age, so to prove my point, I’ll redirect any potentially interested parties to it here. I’d be interested if anyone has any opinions on this matter.

Anyway, the full schedule has yet to go online, but for now I just want spill the beans about the films I’ve been involved in selecting (this is my website, after all…) Most of these are in the Japanese section, though I also brought a couple of other titles to the attention of the festival. In the run up to the main event, I hope to give you a bit more information on at least some of these. There’s some brilliant stuff playing this year, so hope to see as many of you there as possible.

Japanese Women Filmmakers at Raindance

Since 2002, Raindance Film Festival has continued in its strong support for Japanese filmmaking, with its Way Out East section the largest annual showcase for new Japanese cinema in the United Kingdom, screening at least ten recent features and documentaries annually. The 17th Raindance Festival, held between 30 September – 11 October 2009, this year turns its spotlight on the rising tide of women filmmakers in Japan, with a special selection of five features and one shorts program from some of the country’s most exciting talent.

Kakera - A Piece of Our Life

Director Momoko Ando will be in attendance to introduce the World Premiere of her debut feature, A PIECE OF OUR LIFE – KAKERA -. The film, scored by Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, is a touching portrait of a romantic relationship between Haru, a college student whose relationship with her self-centred boyfriend is going nowhere, and Riko, a bisexual medical artist who makes prosthetic body parts. Born in 1982, Ando is the daughter of the acclaimed actor-director Eiji Okuda and the sister of rising starlet Sakura Ando, who features in two other films in the Way out East section, LOVE EXPOSURE and AIN’T NO TOMORROWS. A former student of the Slade School of Fine Art, her return to London to present her new film and serve as one of the festival’s Jury Members promises to be an unforgettable experience.

Also in attendance will be Sachi Hamano, the most prolific female director in Japan with over 400 films to her name, mainly in the genre of the erotic pink film. She will be here to present her 2001 non-pink title LILY FESTIVAL, a comedy drama in which the inhabitants of a residential home for women, aged between 69 and 91, find their passions rekindled when the first male resident moves in amongst them, a 75-year-old lothario with a charming manner and a colourful past. Hamano will be accompanied by LILY FESTIVAL’s screenwriter Kuninori Yamazaki.

Ain't No Tomorrows

Yuki Tanada’s debut feature MOON AND CHERRY played to great aplomb at Raindance in 2006. Her most recent film, AIN’T NO TOMORROWS, is a multi-threaded drama portraying the tangled emotional dynamics of a group of six highschoolers as they reach the age of sexual awareness.

Hotaru

The critically-garlanded Naomi Kawase emerged as the vanguard for the new wave of women filmmakers in Japan after becoming the youngest winner of Caméra d’Or award for best new director at Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for her film SUZAKU. Her feature THE MOURNING FOREST received the Grand Prix at the same festival in 2007, while this year she received the Golden Coach Award for life achievement. Raindance will be screening the new 2009 edit of her rarely seen 2001 film HOTARU, a naturalistically-shot romantic drama between a stripper and traditional craftsman played out against the four seasons in the scenic Nara region where Kawase lives.

Mime-Mime

Yukiko Sode’s MIME-MIME (2008) was one of the discoveries of last year’s Pia Film Festival, launched in 1977 to promote new talent in the world of independent filmmaking. An eccentric portrait of a fractious young woman, Makoto, who lives alone, has a relationship with her mother and sister that borders on downright hostility and plays dangerous sexual games with her married former high-school teacher, it is a distinctive and promising debut.

Raindance will also present a program of three short films from the PEACHES FESTIVAL, an annual event now in its third year organised by Atsuko Ohno (the producer of Raindance Best Feature winner in 2004, MAREBITO: THE STRANGER FROM AFAR, directed by Takashi Shimizu) in conjunction with the Film School of Tokyo to promote first-time women directors. The films are EMERGER, BUNNY IN A HOVEL and CSIKSPOST.

Alongside this year’s special focus on Women Directors, Raindance will feature UK premiers of five other recent Japanese titles, including the epic LOVE EXPOSURE, an unpredictable and near indescribable tour-de-force from maverick director Sion Sono (SUICIDE CIRCLE, EXTE), which won the FIPRESCI Prize and Caligari Film Award at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and the audience award at the New York Asian Film Festival.

Lalapipo

Following on from the successful screenings last year of Miki Satoshi’s ADRIFT IN TOKYO and TURTLES ARE SURPRISINGLY FAST SWIMMERS, comes the director’s latest comic romp INSTANT SWAMP. With a script by Tetsuya Nakashima (KAMIKAZE GIRLS, MEMORIES OF MATSUKO), Masayuki Miyano’s LALAPIPO offers an uproarious and vibrant comic portrait of those at the heart of Japan’s outlandish sex industry.

Vacation

In Hajime Kadoi’s startling drama VACATION, a middle-aged prison guard on death row volunteers to act as a “supporter” during the execution of a condemned prisoner, in order to receive a week’s break from work to go on honeymoon with a bride he barely knows, while in Yasunobu Takahashi’s LOCKED OUT, a six-year-old boy crosses paths with a man on the run and besieged by violent visions.

Tokachi Tsuchiya’s eye-popping documentary A NORMAL LIFE PLEASE blows the lid on the Japanese government’s gradual easing of labour regulations as an overworked truck driver and his family are menaced by a yakuza gang hired by his own employers after he joins his workers union, while the insightful US-Japanese co-production of BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO looks at Japan’s relationship to the insect world.

A Normal Life Please

Outside of the Way Out East section, the Homegrown UK strand will showcase great British filmmaking talent, including the European Premiere of DOWN TERRACE “Ken Loach meets The Sopranos”- attended by Director Ben Wheatley and cast Julia Deakin (HOT FUZZ, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, SPACED) and David Schaal (CLUBBED, KIDULTHOOD, THE OFFICE). The Documentary Strand includes contentious films such as PLAYING COLUMBINE by Danny Ledonne, which raises moral questions surrounding the shoot to kill video games inspired by the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. UNTIL THE LIGHT TAKES US provides a fascinating look at the violence and scandal that rocked the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the early 90s. Darkthrone’s Nocturno Culto will make a rare appearance to DJ at the post-screening party.

Until the Light Takes Us

Sitting on this year’s stellar jury is: Riz Ahmed (Shifty, The Road To Guantanamo), writer/director Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, I’m Alan Partridge, In The Loop), Peter Bradshaw, film critic (The Guardian); actress Kerry Fox (Bright Star, Shallow Grave); director Momoko Ando (Kakera); Billy Childish: artist, musician, poet, writer, filmmaker; Christine Langan, Creative Director, BBC Films; writer and documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare At Goats, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes); Jamie Graham – Assistant Editor, Total Film; Julia Brown – Commercial Director, Apollo Cinemas; Producer Andy Williams and legendary musician/actor Tom Waits.

The festival will be held at the Apollo Cinema, Regent Street, London, between 30 Sept – 11 October 2009.

Tickets, festival passes and more details are all on the Raindance website.