This weekend, films and filmmakers worldwide appeared in the Palace Theater, CNY Jazz Central and locations on the Syracuse University and Le Moyne College campuses for the 2012 Syracuse International Film Festival.

The festival, running Oct. 11-14, highlighted a diverse array of short and feature films from Spain, Korea, Russia, Israel, Hungary, Italy, China, France, Argentina, the United States and more.

SYRFILMFEST ’12 wound down Sunday afternoon with multiple showcases at the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in Newhouse III.

The final showing began with a 20-minute Hungarian film titled “Beast” (Attila Till, 2011). The bleak, gritty short focused on a poor Hungarian farming family with a tyrannical and abusive father named Istvan Balogh (Szabolcs Thuroczy). They live on a small, isolated farm in the plains. Balogh takes in a homeless man named Feri (Balazs Szitas), who essentially becomes his slave. Balogh overworks and torments Feri by beating him, locking him up and shooting BB guns at him with his two young sons.

When Balogh’s daughter gets pregnant and threatens to move in with her boyfriend, Balogh blames Feri and beats him to death with a pipe. As Balogh and his wife are digging the grave, the police arrive and the short ends. It’s a brutal portrayal of warped family values and abusive patriarchs, amplified by economic hardship.

The next film was much lighter but just as violent. The 17-minute Spanish black comedy, called “Muertos y vivientes” (Inaki San Roman, 2011), focused on an elderly woman (Pilar Bayona) making her way through a town overrun by zombies to get to a cemetery. As she drives through the post-apocalyptic town, she uses knitting needles as her weapons to decapitate and run over zombies. She runs out of gas and uses a hula hoop to siphon fuel from an abandoned vehicle until a horde of zombies appears. A hippie couple pulls up in a dilapidated tie-dye colored van, and then blasts the zombies away with shotguns. But the hippie woman gets eaten and her beau gets bitten, so the little old lady grabs the shotgun and puts him out of his misery.

The elderly woman finally arrives at her destination. She drives through a crowd of zombies to reach her husband’s grave and pulls her undead love from the ground. At first he tries to eat her, but when a certain song comes on the radio he suddenly seems to remember who she is, and they drive off into the night as the film ends. It’s morbid, gratuitous and definitely gross, but at the heart of this zombie flick is a love story — albeit a creepy one.

The final film was an experimental Russian film called “Brain” (Andrey Silvestrov, 2009). This unconventional 64-minute experience was a mind-boggler. The film takes place in two realms: modern Moscow and a 3-D fantasy realm where great Russian minds, like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Alexander Blok, battle against the “collective unconscious.” The film is definitely a little out there. Most of the runtime is spent showing interview after interview of Russian citizens talking about their lives and interests. Moscow residents talk about where their lives went wrong and have odd conversations with one another while eerie scores play in the background.

A pulsing brain-like border, growing steadily from pink to deep red as the film progresses, always frames what’s happening. In the fantasy realm, crazy things happen. For example, an army of T. rexes led by a dead philosopher attack an army of Russian nesting dolls. Through a succession of odd interviews and fantastical imagery, the film attempts to give a critical account of the social and political processes taking place in Russia today.

These films aren’t all straightforward, they don’t all make sense, but they all allow audiences to view the world from a lens they’re not accustomed to. If nothing else, SYRFILMFEST ’12 showed films that Syracuse moviegoers would never otherwise get the chance to see.

Published on October 15, 2012 at 12:07 am

Contact Rob: rjmarvin@syr.edu