Maine International Film Festival

MIFF is a Waterville buzz in mid-July. The Maine International Film Festival, in town from July 12 - 21, has over 60 films showing on three screens at the Railroad Square Cinema and a fourth screen at the Waterville Opera House.

The event includes honors for actors, directors, editors, live music, and after-movie parties/receptions. There is also a student component called the Maine Student Film and Video Festival, a competition, and talks on screenplay writing and filming.

This amounts to lots of excitement for our little town of 17,000 or so. Many visitors wander around downtown using up the normal parking spaces, looking for food and coffee, or a drink. Movie buffs buy passes and compare notes for how many each has seen, tips for getting through 2-4 movies a day for ten days, and of course, talk about the good movies.

I saw Viola yesterday, an Argentine film directed by Matías Piñeiro about an all female Shakespearean troupe in Buenos Ares rehearsing their lines for an interpretation of Twelfth Night. Primarily staying with lines from the play that the actresses are memorizing, the film shifts back and forth between the play and real life with certain lines being repeated over and over for various effects.

One woman seduces another to win a bet- or prove the other woman’s ideas about love to be wrong. Another actress, a bicycle carrier, fires up her romance by playing a little hard to get at the advice of the other women.

The movie is wonderfully contemporary and foreign- city scenes, bisexuality, unfamiliar actors- just modern city life. Because it is Shakespeare’s lines doing the seducing the audience can revel in the timelessness of art and sexual attraction.

I cannot tell you who played what parts, but they were all very good. The emotion of the women was captured stunningly by steady close shots on just the actresses’ faces showing the effect of the lines.

It was a wonder to hear Spanish for 65 minutes. The length was just right for an afternoon viewing. English viewers will have all they can do to follow the subtitles- though this gets simpler once you relax into the storyline of the play and realize much repeats. The Spanish sounds so exotic and rapid that it takes a bit to reconcile the audio with the subtitles. 

The director Piñeiro comments, “I have not yet come up with a way of totally fixing the situation. There is always some loss by the time the viewer is reading the subtitles. Also, because Viola has so much repetition, and the viewer understands that, and they’ve already read the subtitles, I thought about just cutting out some sections of subtitles. Thus, the formal idea would take over and all people, Spanish-speakers and not, would be watching the same thing, the things, the faces that really interest me”(Film Comment).

Overall, this is a fun movie with a South American flavor. Check out the MIFF schedule and make your way to Waterville- early to get seats.