MANIFF 2017: Public Intimacy and Railment

Public Intimacy is a film that inspects the nature of love and its boundaries. It is a Portuguese language independent film made on a shoestring budget; the film was conceptualised and made in 5 months. The film was produced by the director and actors together. The film is narrated in four parts, with every part inspecting love of its own kind, and is an excellent example of resilience needed to make cinema.

The first part explores the love between an interracial gay couple. The second part is about the love between a man and a prostitute, in this part the struggle and aspirations of a woman are also shown. The third part is about a transsexual teacher falling in love with a student and the final part and arguably the most explosive part of the film is about the love of a woman with a ghost, and love amongst blood siblings. All the four parts are open ended and in each part the audience is left to think and ask questions themselves.

During the Q&A with the Director Lucian Canton, she revealed that she wanted to make a film where the imagination of the audience can be stirred, since the kind of love explored in the film is not very welcome in her society, as well as a lot of others. She also hesitated to answer a lot of questions from audience as she wanted everyone else to have their own interpretation of every part rather than having only her interpretation of the story.

The film can be next seen at 33rd Chicago Latino Film Festival and Victoria Film Festival, British Columbia.

Railment is an animated experimental film directed by Shunsaku Hayashi. The film is based on a continuous journey of a figure in a train. The idea of a man travelling in a metro train seems really ordinary, but the art of a film is making ordinary into extraordinary. The director has achieved that by not only exploring the dimensions of time and space, but also presenting an image of daily life of people travelling around the metro trains. These people do not have a face, colour or gender, they are just a crowd and nothing else. Such a representation of human life is a testament to the fact that we are nothing but a number in the population of billions.

The film will be next shown at 19th Mecal Pro at Barcelona, 12th Athens Animfest, 55th Ann Arbor Film Fest, Michigan and 29th Filmfest Dresden.