Le Film de Mon Père review – father’s videotape legacy sparks intergenerational dialogue

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A Swiss film-maker’s parent leaves behind a visual diary that raises questions about the limitations of art in a fascinating documentary debut The genesis of Jules Guarneri’s documentary – his first – comes from an unusual gift. Having made more than 20 hours of a filmed diary, his father, Jean, entrusted the material to the budding director, hoping that it would form the building blocks for his son’s first feature. These visual journals, in which the older man addresses the camera – and ultimately Guarneri – with recollections from his past, are awash with nostalgia and regret. As Jean’s recordings are interspersed with Guarneri’s own footage of his family, what starts out as a monologue gradually transforms into an intergenerational dialogue between father and son. Filmed with a fixed camera, Jean’s diaries have a static quality that echoes the stagnancy of his life story. Christabel, his wife and Guarneri’s mother, was an heiress, and the couple lived as idle rich in the Swiss vil...
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‘Audiences don’t want to be challenged’: director Cristian Mungiu on exploring bigotry – and giving up film

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His Palme d’Or-winner explored abortion in his native Romania, and in RMN the director is tackling anti-immigrant sentiment head on. He explains why Europe should pay attention and whether cinema is dead

“Let us mind our words, the west is watching,” says the local mayor, hoping to calm a worked-up crowd of Transylvanian villagers. But the villagers don’t mind their words. Gathered in a packed cultural centre to vent their anger about three Sri Lankans hired by the local bakery, they are angry at everything: the closure of the nearby mine; the villagers who have left for better-paid jobs in Germany and the workload in those jobs that remain; the west’s supposed assault on the nuclear family; the hypocritical European Union. “We got rid of the gypsies,” one irate man in the crowd bellows, “and now we fight over foreigners?”

It’s just one scene from RMN, the new film by Cristian Mungiu, a Palme d’Or-winning director whose work has opened up his homeland Romania to the scrutinising gaze of western European cinema audiences. When Mungiu toured the film around European festivals last year, some people in the Q&A sessions afterwards assumed that the opinions of the villagers were also his.

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