淡季花开

马诺哈拉·K在13岁时就凭借在影片《铁路少年》中的出色表演荣获印度国家电影奖最佳儿童演员奖。如今，二十出头的马诺哈拉初执导筒，将女作家索尼娅·S的获奖自传小说搬上银幕，讲述了一个白化病女孩的成长之路。片中，来自贫困家庭的索尼娅因为白化病在学校受到歧视和敌意，父亲置若罔闻、母亲有心但无力，她只能依靠自己。导演并没有向索尼娅投去同情目光，而是带着一定距离感去呈现她的处境，成功塑造了一个勇敢、乐天的女孩如何接纳自己并让白化病这个“缺点”成为特点。

一位心碎的东德女服务员和一位手臂受伤的伊朗YouTuber在山中的鬼魂搜寻之旅中寻找孤独的慰藉。这是一场关于不太可能的友谊以及对另一种生活的渴望的浪漫冒险。

　　Success in business, having a happy family, and being a rich one are what most people wish for. This is also the wish of the young man A-Hwa. Those who are hardworking, responsible and know how to be grateful will surely be rich and become wealthy.

　　Set in an underground dungeon inhabited by bundled, ragged human beings, after the nuclear holocaust. The story follows the wanderings of a hero through the situations of survival. People wait for the Ark to arrive and rescue them while their habitat falls apart.　　Delving deep into the dusty and long abandonded vaults of b-cinema in search of lost gems always leaves me with a bittersweet taste. On one hand the discovery of unexpected gems where no one would think them possible is a rewarding experience. On the other hand though it makes one wonder how many of these remarkable low-budget oddities, personal love affairs of directors never quite famous and now all but forgotten, have almost forever slipped from memory?　　n any case what we have here is a little post-apocalyptic gem from Poland that is really better than it has any right to. The dystopian near future of O-BI, O-BA finds a group of survivors of the nuclear war that ravaged the Earth inhabiting an underworld concrete bunker and biding their time as they wait for the mysterious Ark, an air ship of some kind that will come and save them. The Ark proves to be an elaborate hoax, carefully designed to give hope to the malnourished and desperate denizens of the bunker, while in the meantime the dome that separates their miserable existence from the nuclear winter outside is slowly caving in.　　What first striked me about the movie is the design of the bunker and the depiction of the survivors. The survivors are gaunt, filthy and terrible-looking penitents, dressed in rags and aimlessly wandering the neon-lit halls of the bunker like automatons. The bunker is a rundown, seedy place, with bright neon lights peering from all sides like the eyes of malignant beasts.　　On one hand it is a slightly 80's depiction of the dystopian future but the movie never stoops down to MAD MAX cheese. Instead it combines biting political satire with the bleak outlook of a world with no future, black comedy with barbs on apathy, religion and power. The survivors, for example, are fed some kind of flour dropping from a tube that hovers in the air - later on we discover the food supervisor uses books and the Bible itself as filler for this meagre meal. There are many such short symbolic touches, perhaps not life-changing or faith-restoring, yet playful, clever and inspired.　　One thing is for sure; O-BI, O-BA is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi schlock. It overcomes its modest budget with creativity and has genuine artistic aspirations both from a writing and directing perspective. My opinion is that it should have been filmed in black and white instead of colour though. The director uses atmospheric light and shadow to great effect and it would have registered even better in stark black and white. The blue-green neon on the other hand outstays its welcome after a while. Just a minor gripe in an otherwise solid b-movie with its heart set in all the right places.　　Imagine a less bleak THE ROAD (Cormac McCarthy) being injected with the satire and humour of DR.STRANGELOVE and you're getting there. See it if you can find it.