{"id":45043,"date":"2019-11-21T10:44:55","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T18:44:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=45043"},"modified":"2019-11-21T10:48:59","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T18:48:59","slug":"nobadi-karl-markovics-2019-austria-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/?p=45043","title":{"rendered":"NOBADI (Karl Markovics, 2019): Austria"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Charlene Huston.\u00a0 <\/span>Viewed at 2019 AFI Film Festival, Los Angeles.\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Under the opening credits, we hear melancholy music and then we see an old man laying in bed, looking as if he has just lost his best friend in the world.\u00a0 <\/span>The camera pans slowly down to his dead, old dog and we feel a tug at the heartstrings as we feel his pain.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And so begins this complex tale of consequence and chance encounters, featuring an unlikely pair – an old Austrian man with a dark past, Robert (Heinz Trixner) and Abid (Borhanulddin Hassan Zadeh) a young migrant from Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

Robert is determined to dig a hole in his backyard to bury his beloved dog, but while doing so, breaks the handle of his pick ax and must make a trip to the large, anonymous local home-depot like hardware store to buy a new one.\u00a0 <\/span>Lamenting the fact that it is so expensice, he purchases it, walks out of the store, and is followed home by Abid who asks if he needs help.<\/span><\/p>\n

From this simple \u2018cute meet\u2019 we are drawin into a tale so mysterious as to become mythic in the capable hands and vision of Writer\/Director Karl Markovics.\u00a0 <\/span>I found it interesting to note this is his third feature.\u00a0 He directed Superworks<\/i> and Breathing<\/i> which premiered at the 2011 Cannes\u2019 Director\u2019s Fortnight to critical acclaim.\u00a0 <\/span>He is also an actor (The Counterfeiters,<\/i> The Grand Budapest Hotel<\/i>) which may account for the quirky twists of emotion he helps his superb actors bring to the screen. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I was memsmerized by the attention to detail Cinematographer Serafin Spitzer brought to the film.\u00a0 <\/span>The exterior shots have an almost flat quality while the interior shots are alive with color – which I took to represent the juxtaposition the characters express in their interior and exterior lives.\u00a0 <\/span>But fasten your seatbelt, for this movie takes us to unexpected and sometimes knarly, even brutal places in Act Three, as past and present converge in unexpected ways between these two characters spending a single afternoon together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both men at first hide their pasts, yet an almost father\/son relationship oozes in, taking them both quite by surprise.\u00a0 <\/span>As they share stories of their pasts \u2026 both having survived \u2018camps\u2019 \u2026 we come to realize these experiences have clearly informed their lives today.\u00a0 <\/span>They find their way through their own prejudices and pre-conceived notions to find some common ground. \u00a0 In a world that is so divided, I believe this is an important message to explore.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dealing with themes of loss, grief, identity, forgiveness and family, Nobadi<\/i> shows the lengths to which people will go to bury their past and seek redemption in unexpected places.\u00a0 <\/span>It made <\/span><\/p>\n

This film premiered at the 2019 Toronto Film Festival in the Contemporary World Cinema section.me think about karma and accumulated guilt.\u00a0 It <\/span><\/span>will make you laugh and cry and ponder the very assumptions we all carry around every day in our hearts and in our souls \u2026 asking questions like: Who am I?\u00a0 <\/span>What am I willing to do to make it through the day?\u00a0 What divides and what connects us?\u00a0 What would I do when faced with a life\/death decision?\u00a0 <\/span>Who would I die for?\u00a0 This movie made me think and question my\u00a0<\/span>assumptions about what makes us human.<\/p>\n

In the end, I was left wondering, what haunts us and what do we do about that?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Charlene Huston.\u00a0 Viewed at 2019 AFI Film Festival, Los Angeles. Under the opening credits, we hear melancholy music and then we see an old man laying in bed, looking as if he has just lost his best friend in the world.\u00a0 The camera pans slowly down to his dead, old dog and we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[369,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afi-filmfest-2019","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/247243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45043"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45043\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45545,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45043\/revisions\/45545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}