November as I prepare, confident in my virtual screening accreditation, to make my film selection for the AFI Fest, a bad surprise is in store for me: virtual screenings represent only a fraction of the films invited at the Festival. At AFI, only four international features were available for the remote viewer. Remained an off-beat entry, a North American premiere to boot, the first feature by Kaltrina Krasniqi, a young female director from Kosovo 1 , Vera Andrron Detin Vera Dreams of the Sea , which, in spite of winning the Grand Prix at the Tokyo Film Festival, has so far gathered relatively little critical attention β but for a very complimentary review by Jessica Kiang in Variety.
In her 60s, Vera, a respected sign-language interpreter, is married to Fatmir Xhevat Qorraj , a former judge who, since his retirement, spends most of this time sullenly lounging in pyjamas at home. She also has a surprise for Fatmir: a decrepit little house he has inherited in the countryside can now be sold for about the double of what they expected, as it is on the way of a highway to be constructed.
The only thing Vera has to do is to sign a paper for the lawyer. Yet Vera steadfastly refuses to sign. And thus she signs β but she is not defeated, and will find an efficient way to strike back. The one official competition at the AFI concerns the shorts, and the Festival offered a generous selection, all available on-line.
Not all shorts will blossom into a filmmaking career for their author, but there is not such a difference in the cinematic vocabulary in the feature and the short filmmaker. So this was my chance to write about shorts, facing an embarrassment of riches. The majority of the films were not fully experimental; but they were exceptions, including a couple of animation entries that had already been seen in Locarno. Weaving an arresting visual texture between hand-drawn animation, live action, written words and collage, Cam Van Nguyen, who had studied at the prestigious FAMU in Prague, lets the emotion seep in the fracture or the juxtaposition between the different media she uses.
When her Vietnamese father was in prison in Austria, and they were writing to each other regularly, this is the time when they were closest to each other.
