The 3rd Annual Salt Lake City Film Festival 08.18-08.21

The Salt Lake City Film Festival accepts films from around the globe and brings them to SLC for one weekend in August. This year’s festival was held August 18-21 at the Tower Theater, Broadway Center Theater, Post Theater and Brewvies Cinema Pub. Organized by a small crew of regular guys and gals from around our town, there’s an incredibly warm, inviting feel to the festival that visitors have found to be a contrast from festivals like Sundance. In years past, documentary films like Best Worst Movie, Cleanflix, American Jihadist, and Sons of a Gun have helped the festival to gain a reputation as an abnormally doc-heavy fest, while still bringing narrative films from newer filmmakers of the highest caliber. The SLCFF also gives directors of short films an opportunity to submit their work, and shorts were scheduled to precede each full-length screening. This year’s program kept with the themes while providing a laid-back atmosphere and plenty of after parties to mingle at.

Green
Director: Sophia Takal
Sebastian (Lawrence Michael Levine) and Genevieve (Kate Lyn Sheil) have been together for four years when they rent a secluded country house in rural West Virginia in order to record a comedic blog about living off the land. The morning after their first night they find Robin (writer/director/editor Sophia Takal) curiously asleep on their front lawn. The former New Yorkers start a reluctant friendship with their new neighbor despite their cultural and educational differences, which sets off a chain reaction of subtle jealousies. An atmosphere of uncertainty and tension is constantly present throughout the film mostly due to Ernesto Carcamo’s score. While the moodiness is a bit inconsistent and annoying during the introductory scenes of the film, the reason for this, and the creepy transitional shots of dense forest, soon become apparent. Green is a psychological thriller about the things lurking in hidden places: insecurity, anxiety, paranoia, and as the title would suggest, envy. Though it is unlikely to receive as much recognition, it deserves accolades among some of its obvious influences such as 3 Women, The Shining and Deliverance. It’s not without a couple annoying cinematographic choices (shots taken from too far away, characters staring at things taking place out of the frame, etc.), but those things aside, Green is an impressive premiere for Takal and possibly the most perfect mumble-horror film I’ve ever seen.

The Invention of Dr. Nakamats
Director: Kaspar Astrup Schröder
Dr. Nakamats, history’s most prolific inventor, is turning 80 years old and Danish filmmaker Kaspar Astrup Schröder gets the privilege of filming it. An incredibly gifted and eccentric man, Dr. Nakamats holds 3,357 patents for different inventions ranging from golf clubs to indestructible glass to motors that run on heat and water to the first floppy disk. Schröder’s documentary acts as a biopic hosted by the subject himself. There is no voice over. There is no fact checking. There is minimal interview with anyone other than Dr. Nakamats himself. In that way, it’s different from most other documentaries. It documents the way this one man sees the world and himself, rather than striving for an objective representation. When he describes how he sleeps only four hours a night, eats one meal a day, is going to live to the age 144, and that all his best inventions come to him while holding his breath underwater, Dr. Nakamats seems like a fictional character. Imagine listening to a Japanese Steve Zissou for one hour, and you’re somewhere close. Though it is very playful and funny, Schröder’s film touches on something more serious as well. It acts as a character study of a man who has an inflated sense of a concept that runs deep in Japanese culture: use every second of your life to better yourself. Nakamats seems sincere in his objective to better not only himself, but the entire human condition. Accompanied by a charming Mark Mothersbaugh score that sticks very close to his Royal Tenenbaums contributions, The Invention of Dr. Nakamats is a hilarious look at one of the most interesting men to ever live.

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