The Saint Louis International Film Festival just began (November 8-18) and it’s something that always improves my day. My one day a week job, drove me insane. I learned that teachers want to be teachers, so they can act like children. Yes horrible generalization, but today made me angry. But lets stray away from that and focus on the positive, right? The film festival! Being that I know German and Swedish I love to watch German and Swedish films, totally logical. 🙂 Unfortunately living in Saint Louis seeing foreign films in general is not the easiest thing to do. Luckily for me and many others there is the Film Festival. This year is was sponsored by Whitaker and apparently the brought something like 400 films in 50 languages, if I remember what the guy said right, unfortunately it was before an amazing film so I probably got the numbers wrong, sorry…. Either way there are at least a handful of films I want to see, sadly be aware they are $12 tickets ($10 for students). It is an amazing opportunity to see films that you wouldn’t normally, so I think it is totally worthy the semi hefty price. Now to the first film in my SLIFF experience of the year…
“Die vierte Macht” (“The Fourth State”) Written and Directed by Dennis Gansel
I’m going to be honest I was drawn to this film by my love of Moritz Bleibtreu. He is in tons of movies, but I think the first one I saw him in was “Run Lola Run” (another amazing film, see it if you haven’t already). This film’s description says that it is German and Russian, but if you are one of those people that hate to read movies, this is a good one for you. There is some Russian, a tiny bit of German (like 3 lines and the title) and the rest is in English. The film follows a German journalist, Paul Jensen, (Bleibtreu) who picked up his life in Berlin and moved to Moscow to work at a Celebrity Gossip Magazine, that his father helped found. While in Moscow he meet Katja, Kasia Smutniak, and she convinces him to write an obituary about a fellow reporter. He finds himself getting wrapped up in a terrorist plot. He is then forced to look into his and his father’s past in order to uncover a political conspiracy The film is filled with Politics, Fighting, Prison, Murder and thing a good political thriller should have. Personally after seeing this film I’m not sure if I will be visiting Russia anytime soon. No just kidding, but it is that shocking of a film. The only issue that I had was that I was expecting much more German in the film, but overall it is an amazing film that everyone should see. No I don’t just give positive film reviews, but I have only seen a lot of great films lately.
Just a little sKATterbrained. 