i saw my last two festival films today, la petite jerusalem and the district!. once again two very different movies.
"la petite jerusalem" is about an orthodox jewish french woman living in a multi-ethnic parisian neighborhood who falls in love with an algerian. i thought it was pretty good. it really was from the woman's point of view and so you end up learning a lot more about life as a woman in an insular orthodox community than the algerian side of the equation.
"the district!" was another thing entirely. rather hard to describe too, but let me try. the film is a full length animated feature. it's a musical (mostly hip-hop) and it's in hungarian. it's also extremely vulgar and more than a bit misogynist. and yes, there is a crack whores musical number.
and here's the plot: a bunch of multi-ethnic kids (hungarians, slavs, gypsies, an arab, etc) from a budapest 'hood decide they need money. they learn from a news report that rich people have oil, and so they ask a smart kid (i.e. a kid with glasses) about where oil comes from. after he tells them, they build a time machine, go back to prehistoric times, detonate a nuclear bomb on the spot where their neighborhood will later be (they get the bomb from osama bin laden, who is hiding in the arab kid's basement in budapest), lure a bunch of woolly mammoths into the crater, and bury them. when they go forward in time again, the mammoths have all turned to oil and so they strike it rich. this, of course, causes all kinds of problems, including an american bombing campaign once president bush finds out that there is oil in hungary.
in some ways "the district!" was the perfect festival film, even though it wasn't the greatest movie. it was unlike anything i have seen before (well, i guess it was a little bit like that southpark film), and it will never ever get a distributor in this country. the philly film festival was it's u.s. premier, so it will probably do the festival circuit for a little while.
and that's it for the festival. at least for me. i just realized that i never mentioned porcelain doll on this site, another hungarian film that i saw on thursday. there, i just did. i saw 14 films in all, had a blast, liked most of them at least to some extent. but now i'm done. at least until the gay film festival this summer.
