MARCH 28 » 8:00p
APRIL 1 » 9:45p
CLOSING NIGHT FILM + EAST COAST PREMIERE
2009, Belgium, 90 min.
Director/Screenwriter: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani
Cast: Marie Bos, Delphine Brual, Harry Cleven, Bianca Maria D’Amato
A young girl wanders a gloomy mansion, catching her first glimpses of sex and death. An adolescent experiences the power of her sexuality as something both powerful and fearful. Finally, a woman finds herself involved in a mysterious and deadly game, in which the roles are unclear but the stakes are deadly. Amer is made up of these three chapters, which seem to present progressive stages in the life of one woman (played by three different actors).
Brussels-based filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani have previously collaborated on a series of five short films over the past decade; Amer is their first feature. Their work celebrates their shared love for the Italian horror film of the 1970s, with its operatic set pieces of violence, eroticism, or both, as well as its baroque visual style and its swooning music (used as the soundtrack in Amer). They have wisely expanded their work from short form to feature length by structuring Amer as a series of self-contained sequences. It is up to the audience to imagine the links between the three sections. The film is nearly wordless; the story is told visually, through color, camera angle and the faces, bodies and movement of the performers.
Amer is above all a film about looking, heightening the stakes to foreground the ways in which looking can be both pleasurable and deadly. The filmmakers gently bring to the fore the tension between Eros and Thanatos in the horror film, as the sex drive and the death drive alternate between facing off with each other and joining forces to make ecstasy deadly and death ecstatic. In doing so, Cattet and Forzani return eroticism to its rightful place in the horror genre (in the face of so much recent torture porn, whose sole pleasure seems to be to punish the body). This doesn’t mean that Amer is a softcore horror film; rather it presents desire as a wild force we master only occasionally, and at our peril.
— David Pendleton, Programmer, Harvard Film Archive
PLAYING WITH
Eiko
Christoph Kuschnig
Austria
13 min.
Itinerant handyman, Alex, no stranger to life on the road. But his life takes a sharp turn when Lili, a mysterious young hitchhiker obsessed with sex and suicide, appears in the back of his truck.
