Berlinale 2011, day 1 (Blood Alone)

Straying from my own principles I didn’t watch the opening movie, True Grit will be shown over here shortly after the Berlinale anyways.

Dance Town (????)
South Korea 2010, Jeon Kyu-Hwan, 95?

Jung-Min and her husband live a relatively privileged life in Pyeongyang, he travels to China regularly and brings back South Korean porn and cosmetics, they clearly love each other and even have a healthy sex life. One day, they get found out and Jung-Min has to flee alone, because her Husband only managed to arrange her escape while he himself gets arrested. In South Korea, Jung-Min is given an apartment after lengthy interrogation and is secretly being watched while she very slowly tries to adapt to the almost completely alien world around her. In a sub-plot, the situation of Ji-Na is shown; a girl in middle school who just found out she’s pregnant and now has to deal with the consequences without knowledge or support from others.

If you have an issue with bleeding girls and women, this movie is not for you. Funnystuff aside, here we have a quite typical example of asian-movie-for-western-festivals: long takes and slow story with heavy reliance on mood and atmosphere (of novelty to western audiences although we should all be experts on Asian cultures by now?). The execution however, is absolutely solid as Jung-Min’s and Ji-Na’s loneliness come through very well although the latter seems kind of tacked onto the main story, she deserves a movie of her own. Seeing as the director explicitly stated that his only goal was to show how lonely people can be although there so many others around them, the film thoroughly succeeds. If you like that kind of theme then do watch it, by all means. I definitely “enjoyed” it.

Blood Alone is a totally awesome vampire-loli-manga/novel about a vampire loli and her closet-lolicon guardian. It sounds stupid and perverted, but it’s actually quite d’awwwww.