During my brief stint at the Rotterdam Film Festival this week I selected my films without any particular governing principle other than, perhaps, variety: An Iraqi documentary, an Argentine midlife crisis drama, a French sex comedy, a Spanish zombie horror flick, a Greek psycho-mystery, a musical not-quite-biopic, and a contemplative Israeli film of cultural understanding. Did I mention zombies?

So, while there was no real rhyme or reason to my picks, reflecting on the cinematic smorgasbord before me, I did make one curious observation: There were no happy endings.

“The word ‘action’ – it brings back life.”

First up was War, Love, God, Madness by Mohamed Al-Daradji [1], a doc chronicling the making of Oscar-nominated Ahlaam [2] (2005), the second Iraqi feature film post-Saddam. Full of rag-tag footage of Iraq circa 2004, this film manages to show a broad cross-section of life in Baghdad in the first years of the American occupation. The film’s title comes from the observation that the Arabic word for “war” can be easily turned into the words for either “love” or “God” by removing different letters.

Any would-be filmmaker will appreciate the staggering challenges faced by the idealistic Al-Daradji, as he struggles to get film in the can in a war zone. “If you don’t fight for your dreams then you don’t deserve them,” he explains, but the fact that he actually succeeds in producing the film is small consolation for the tragedies surrounding its creation. Crew members are kidnapped, traumatized, and nearly a third of them, we learn, were forced to flee Iraq.

The unique perspective and remarkable on-the-ground footage – particularly a stunning sequence shot from a moving cab as it flees the scene of an urban firefight – propelled the documentary onto Rotterdam’s audience awards Top 10 [3] list.

I chose El Otro [4] from director Ariel Rotter [5] because its plot, involving a man who briefly assumes the identity of a dead fellow traveler to escape his own life, sounded interesting. Unfortunately, the protagonist’s “journey within” turns out to be not much of a journey at all, and the film’s short running time and sluggish pacing don’t leave much time for personal exploration or transformation. The midlife crisis of a nondescript businessman, who “discovers” his real life isn’t all that bad after all, just didn’t grab me. Exceptions made for the two scenes with the man’s aging father, both quite charming.

More charming still was Un Baiser s'il vous plait [6] (or Shall We Kiss) by filmmaker Emmanuel Mouret [7], which seems to argue that “a kiss of no consequence” is truly impossible. Two friends fall in love accidentally in a bittersweet story within a story. From a set-up of Woody Allen-esque awkwardness, the film manages to be quite funny at times, yet leaves itself room for a poignant dénouement.

I got dragged to a late-night screening of [REC] [8] by Jaume Balagueró [9] and Paco Plaza [10], but must confess I had a blast in the small but packed theater of press and industry festival goers. It’s basically 28 Days Later but made on a budget in an apartment building, and while in that sense conventional, the film manages to take reality-TV style POV and apply it very effectively to the horror genre. The narrative unfolds in several long, spatially-edited (apparently uninterrupted) sequences that offer the right mix of tension and release so as to be fun but not stupid. Kudos to the filmmaker for bringing us the freakiest zombie six-year-old you’ll ever see.

I will go out on a small limb and predict that the American re-make slated to be called Quarantine for release next October will suck.

What is the sound of mold?

From Greece, Tale 52 [11] by Alexis Alexiou [12] is a brain-bender reminiscent of Eraserhead, which pits a mentally unstable antihero, Iasonas, against himself as he questions his own perception of reality. The visual style, with lots of handheld CUs and drifting focus, while not groundbreaking or awe inspiring, is consistent and strangely appropriate. The dark mood is more a product of the sound design; in once scene, the protagonists' overlapping voices reflect his shattered memory, and the soundtrack’s deep cellos combined with high-frequency ambience are brooding and disconcerting.

Iasonas fixates on bits of mold encroaching upon the walls and ceilings of his apartment, bubbling off the paint, just as a persistent and unexplained headache invades his consciousness. The prevalence of liquid textures – running water, the sea – also reference the jagged flow of his thoughts. Iasonas obsesses over a bit of toothpaste dribbled on his shirt, and the reasons for his lover’s sudden departure, which he neither understands nor can cope with.

Time is a variable in this story, so it’s not entirely clear where “the end” is, but surely we get no sense of resolution or redemption.

“I accept chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me.”

The “not-quite-biopic” I mentioned above was Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There about which much virtual ink has already been spilled. Cate Blanchett is marvelous, but otherwise, I’ll pass.

The Band’s Visit by Eran Kolirin [13], was chosen to be the official closing film of the 2008 International Film Festival Rotterdam, which gave it a sold-out screening in the festival's largest venue, the 2,700-seat Grote Zaal (large hall) of de Doelen [14] building.

Arabic and Hebrew make up much of the dialogue, and while the rest of the dialogue was in English, regrettably the film screened at Rotterdam with only Dutch subtitles. Even after ten months living in Amsterdam, these were only occasionally helpful, I’m sorry to say.

The story revolves around an Egyptian police band, en route to a gig at an Arab cultural center, which accidentally finds itself stuck in a small rural Israeli town for a day. Residents of the town, which bears a name similar to that of the band’s destination, are at first suspicious, but after recognizing the group's ironic, almost comical misfortune, they embrace the musicians and offer to host them for the night. The result is an interesting meditation on bridging a cultural divide, music, and the power of friendship. The band does eventually get where it’s going, a small achievement that comes closest to bucking the “no happy endings” trend.

The Band’s Visit was selected to be Israel’s entry into the Best Foreign Language film category at the Oscars, but it turns out the film’s dialogue is more than 50 percent in English, so it was disqualified and replaced. Nevertheless, it's coming to a Netflix queue [15] near you, you can check it out at TheBandsVisit.com [16].

Related links:

Watch the trailer for El Otro [17].

Watch the trailer of Un baiser s'il vous plait [18].

Watch the trailer for [REC] [19].

Watch the trailer for Tale 52 [20].