Well, I saw two more films at the Sarasota Film Festival, the Danish film Stealing Rembrandt which had it's US premiere Saturday, and Bedwin Hacker from Tunisia. It's kind of cool to be able to go see movies that almost no one has seen yet, in a movie snob sort of way. Yesterday when I went with my brother to see Stealing Rembrandt, he thought it was pretty funny because everybody who was waiting in line was clearly wealthy, retiree, artsy snob type who were all dressed up, probably just because it was a film festival that they were at. We were both a good thirty years younger than anybody else there. Any time I've gone to a movie around here that's artsy or foreign, my siblings and I are always the youngest people, by far, in the theater.
Bedwin Hacker is the first movie I've seen where computers and hacking were involved that I didn't sit there the whole time thinking how ridiculous the movie is. The film centers around a woman in Tunisia who is hacking into satellite transmissions to send what were basically Tunisian nationalist messages over the French airwaves (I didn't realize this was possible, but apparently, it's happened before). Not knowing enough about Tunisian history and Tunisian/French relations, the motivations for hacking didn't entirely make sense, though it seemed to be partly motivated by French crackdown on illegal Tunisian immigration, and partly a way of encouraging Tunisian's living in France to embrace their national and ethnic pride. As Kalt, the hacker, is wreaking havoc (and becoming a Kevin Mitnick style folk hero), the French police are trying to figure out who is doing it, and to track her down. One interesting thing about the movie is that all of the computer-savvy people are women--Kalt, her 10 yr old niece who is also involved in hacking the satellite systems, and the French intelligence agent who's trying to catch them. In America, the stereotype is of the teenage pizza-eating male hacker, but here you have a movie from Tunisia, of all places, where you find female geeks. If Bedwin Hacker makes it into any theaters or on video in the US (I don't think it has a US distributor yet), I would recommend watching it.
Stealing Rembrandt is inspired by a real-life heist of two paintings from an art museum in Denmark. The erstwhile thieves didn't realize that one of those paintings was in fact the only Rembrandt in Denmark. Stealing Rembrandt takes that story, and turns it into a tale of four small time thieves who acidentally steal the wrong painting when the father and his partner in crime go to lift another painting in a robbery planned by the son and his roommate. It's not so easy to get rid of a Rembrandt when the entire country, the Danish police, Interpol, and crime figures are all trying to find it. It's a very funny movie, though there are also moving dramatic elements mixed in. Judging from the response at the film festival, it might actually have a chance to get picked up by a US distributor, which would be great. If it does make it to theaters, I highly recommend going to see it.
Posted by kathryn at Enero 30, 2004 02:31 AM | TrackBack