All My Sisters focuses for the most part of on two young women who happen to be the director's nieces (Film review)

  

Advertising for the 50th Hong Kong International 

Film Festival hanging on the railings of an overhead bridge  

 

All My Sisters (Austria-France-Germany-Iran, 2025) 

- Massoud Bakshi, director and co-producer (with five others)

- Part of the HKIFF's Documentary Competition program 

 

The first film of the 50th Hong Kong International Film Festival that I viewed 18 films ago was Woman and Child, an Iranian cinematic offering.  The final film of those I chose to watch also hails from Iran.  (All My Sisters is officially listed as four country co-production but is very recognizably an Iranian work.)  

 

To some extent, this is not something that's extraordinary as the Hong Kong International Festival has long programmed offerings from that Middle Eastern country (and, in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's been a big champion of Jafar Panahi over the years.)  At the same time though, I figure this is also a reflection of Iran having been in the news in recent months (even before the Iran-USA War commenced); and the focus on Iranian women in the films (I think also of Past Future Continuous) selected for this edition of the HKIFF reflecting this.

 

Of course this is not to say that the likes of All My Sisters got selected by the Hong Kong International Film Festival as a "pity vote".  Because it genuinely is an interesting documentary work; one that is the result of filmmaker Massoud Bakshi training his camera on his two nieces for a couple of decades or so and then putting together home videos that, individually, can seem rather ordinary but collectively make for an interesting portrait of two sisters growing up and coming of age in Tehran under the rule of the Mullahs.

 

When we first see Mahya and Zahra in All My Sisters, they are sans hijab as they are still young -- and, as Massoud Bakshi stresses, in the company of family.  Even while it's clear that they are living in Iran, they still can seem like generic carefree preteens similar to girls in their age group in various other parts of the world as they happily listen to what's emanating from cassette players, playing with Barbies at home, and swinging on equipment in public playgrounds.

 

But at the first sign of puberty, the headscarves get put on.  Also, their religious grandmother starts trying to get them more interested in the Quran and Islam in general.  And there is a distinct and growing sense that their lives will be more restricted and less carefree.  (It would have been interesting for there to have been a parallel coverage of Mahya and Zahra's male contemporaries.  But the glimpses we see of the men as well as boys, who can go about their lives with much less covering, already says quite a bit.)

 

Something that is stressed more than once in All My Sisters is that what's shown in the film is shown with the consent of Mahya and Zahra.  Which makes it really surprising, then, that we see them being among the Iranians who take part in the "Women, Life, Freedom" protests.

 

At the same time, this helps makes the title of the film make sense.  In that, for a good part of it, I thought it would have been more appropriately entitled "My Two Nieces".  But when Mahya and Zahra are depicted and looked upon as representative Iranian women, than the chosen title of All My Sisters makes quite the political statement about Iranian women and society as a while indeed.

 

My rating for this film: 7.         

Favoriten shows us a multicultural Austrian elementary class' world (Film review)

  

48th Hong Kong International Film Festival 

advertising by the side of a street

 

Favoriten (Austria, 2024)

- Ruth Beckermann, director and co-scriptwriter (with Elisabeth Manesse)

- Part of the Hong Kong International Film Festival's Documentary Competition program

 

In what can seem like another life now, I aspired to be an educator.  Hence my often gravitating to books. TV shows and films with educational settings (including, to name just a few: To Serve Them All My Days; To Sir With Love; The Paper Chase; and Dead Poet's Society).  

 

If given the choice though, I'd focus on secondary or tertiary rather than primary education.  For, frankly, my sense is that the younger the child, the more difficult it is to deal with them!  So I am inclined to take my hat off the most to primary school teachers -- and was left in awe of the one we see in Favoriten -- who is obviously adored by her young charges, all 25 of them, the majority of whom she teaches and communicates with in a language that's not their first language.

 

Ilkay Idiskut is a teacher in the largest elementary school in Vienna, Austria.  Favoriten -- which takes its name from the working-class district in which the school is located -- documents the goings-on in her classroom over a period of three years as she guides her multi-cultural, co-ed class of students (many of them recent migrants and/or refugees from countries such as Turkey (where she herself originally hailed), Syria, Serbia, Romania and Ukraine) through the third to fifth grade of the Austrian school system.  

 

Director Ruth Beckerman and cinematographer Johannes Hammel also follow Ilkay and her class on trips to a mosque (where a student proudly reveals that his father is an imam) and a Catholic church (where it is revealed that none of the students are of the Catholic faith).  There are also scenes where the parents, with their children present, meet with Ilkay (where it comes to light that quite a few of the parents are themselves struggling with speaking German); and one where the school's head teacher holds a meeting with his staff (during which one gets the distinct sense that the school (system) is not as well-funded as should be the case).

 

In the main though, the focus in Favoriten is on the learning that takes place in the classroom; with Ilkay teaching the class about how to behave and treat one another as well as maths, German and other formal subjects.  And while Ilkay is the main "character" in the film on account of her being the teacher in charge and primary adult in the documentary, the students quickly show that they may be diminuitive in size but quite a few of them have outsize personalities, and presences that have an effect on their surroundings and others around them!

 

At one point during filming, director Beckermann gave the children camera phones and had them film and conduct interviews of their classmates.  This results in interesting footage and conversations.  But the actual film crew also appear to have been successful in getting the children to act naturally in their presence too; resulting in Favoriten being a remarkably intimate collective portrait of a group of children whose struggles along with endeavor are honestly shown, and who have been helped along for three years by the presence in their life of an exemplary educator who truly cared for them.    

 

My rating for this film: 7.0

Making musical associations while atop Seongsan Ilchulbong (and elsewhere)

Puppet Ponyo atop Seongsan Ilchulbong

 

Early morning view from the top of Seongsan Ilchulbong

 

Looking out towards the actually much higher  

Hallasan from atop Seongsan Ilchulbong

  

If anyone were to ask me, I would not describe myself as a particularly musical person.  Yes, I took piano lessons for several years as a child (like many Asian children are made to do).  And yes, I also learnt to play the recorder and pianica at school, and actually was in the school choir and orchestra back in primary school.  But I didn't have the musical passion that I've seen a number of other people have and, unusually for an Asian, have never ever been out to a karaoke bar (even while I have been to plenty of bars where the primary activities are drinking alcohol and chatting)!

 

At the same time though, I can't deny my liking to sing in the shower and sometimes even while out hiking in the countryside by myself or strolling about on a street.  And there really are celebratory and/or happy moments when a particular song will suddenly pop into my head and I may give into an impulse to sing it out aloud! 

 

On a visit to England's Lake District many years ago, I was moved to sing the theme song from The Sound of Music after hiking up a hill and coming across the kind of scenic vistas that got me thinking of the ones that saw Julie Andrews (as Maria von Trapp) burst out in song in my favorite movie when I was younger than sixteen going on seventeen.  And after hiking up Jeju's Seongsan Ilchulbong and seeing the sunrise from atop it, a part of me wanted to burst out in song while up there too.

 

But whereas I had felt free to sing out loud on that hill in the Lake District because there was just one other person up there at the time (and she happened to be my cousin, who happily sang along after I got going!), there were too many people atop Seongsan Ilchulbong (aka Sunrise Peak) at the same time as me for my comfort!  So I contented myself with drinking in the beautiful views from atop the 180-meter-high volcanic cone, taking snaps of Puppet Ponyo posing atop it, and periodically humming sections of Cat Stevens' Morning Has Broken and The Carpenters' Top of the World under my breath.

 

Incidentally, besides being places that have made me want to burst into song, the Lake District and Seongsan Ilchulbong also both happen to be UNESCO World Heritage-listed sites -- of which I count myself fortunate to have visited 75 (in 23 different countries) to date.  And so too is Salzburg, which I will forever associate with The Sound of Music, and where I also was moved to sing songs from that movie when I spent time in that fair city! ;b  

Three more films viewed at the 2013 HKIFF

Yellow is the predominant color of 

the HKIFF (publicity materials) this year

Hmmm... thus far, my blog entry about five Hong Kong International Film Festival (HKIFF) offerings that I've viewed has attracted a grand total of zero comments.  Nonetheless, I'm going to go ahead and present my views on three more films viewed at this year's HKIFF -- if nothing else than because I find that blogging about such helps me to better remember them.  So onwards we go...

Hap Ki Do (Hong Kong, 1972)

- From The Cinematic Matrix of Golden Harvest program

- Huang Feng, director

- Starring Angela Mao, Carter Huang, Sammo Hung, Whang Ing Sik, Ji Han Jae

Before anything else, here's mentioning that when I checked this afternoon, not a single screening in The Cinematic Matrix of Golden Harvest has sold out thus far -- and yes, we're talking here about a program that includes movies starring Angela Mao, Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan, etc.  Based on what I saw of this, I find it a crying shame -- because, in all honesty, my viewing of this more than 40 years old film has been the highlight of my 2013 HKIFF thus far.  (And I am inclined to think there are some people who agree with me since applause broke out at the end of the film at the screening I was at -- something that doesn't happen as regularly at the Hong Kong International Film Festival as is the case at, say, the American film fests I've been to.)

Granted that this Huang Feng movie doesn't have the most original of stories -- seeing as it tells a tale of courageous people trying to endure before deciding to be more pro-active and rise up against hated oppressors.  But there's also no question for me that its fight scenes -- be they friendly sparring matches or fights fought in earnest -- are well enacted and really exhilarating to watch.  

Upon looking back with the help of this work, there's greater appreciation of 1970s Hong Kong cinema having female action stars like Angela Mao; this not least since the second decade of the 21st century sees this same territorial cinema having no emerging female star of her caliber as well as capable of evoking the kind of fatal fury that she did in this movie that also stands out for highlighting a Korean martial art rather than the more usual ones that were born in China.

My rating for this film: 9

Beautiful 2013 (Japan-Taiwan-Mainland China-Hong Kong, 2013)

- From the Galas program

- Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Wu Nien Jen, Lu Yue and Mabel Cheung, directors

- Starring Mao Mita, Lo Pei An, Elaine Kam, etc.

The bad news: Not a single work among the fourth set of short films commissioned by the Hong Kong International Film Festival rises to the heights of the short film directed by Ann Hui that was part of last year's Beautiful.2012. On the plus side, neither does this four film anthology have a segment that is even half as frustrating to view as last year's short film by Tsai Min Liang or the section of 2011's Quattro Hong Kong 2 directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Continuing with the positives: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Beautiful New Bay Area Project has a kick ass heroine to savour; Wu Nien Jen's A New Year, The Same Days -- the best of this 2013 quartet -- offers up plenty of amusing moments; and cinematographer-director Lu Yue's 1 Dimension is visually beautiful and a real aesthetic standout. However, all of these works are not even enough to entirely satisfy.

Even more sadly, this year, they didn't save the best for last -- and it's also disappointing that a Hong Kong director's effort (i.e., Mabel Cheung's) was the weakest offering of the quartet, one that tried to get by one emotion and a love of Hong Kong but not working because its main characters just aren't likeable enough, and (consequently) hard to empathize with.

My rating for this film: 6.5 + 8 + 7 + 5 averages out to ~6.5

Museum Hours (USA-Austria, 2012)

- From the Global Vision program

- Jem Cohen, director

- Starring Bobby Sommer, Mary Margaret O'Hara

This docu-drama revolving around a sympathetic Kunsthistoriches Museum guard and a Canadian visitor to Vienna who he befriends is not the kind of film whose screening I expect to sell out at the HKIFF nor one that I'd expect to prompt a number of people walk out in the middle of.  Upon my witnessing both these things happened, I have to say that it's really hard indeed to predict (Hong Kong) film (fest) audiences. 

For my part, I found this admittedly slow paced effort to be generally interesting -- even if it ended up taking part less within the museum than I thought it would and actually showing more of an everyday, and often gray, Vienna than I thought it would.  And while I have to admit to having nodded off during the portion of the cinematic offering in which a woman spoke in detail about a particular Bruegel painting that hangs in the museum, this film also got my mind wandering in a good way -- and thinking back to my 1987 visit to the Austrian capital city and fondly recalling many details about it that I found more colorful than was shown in this work!

My rating for this film: 7