Philly Plain Dealer

The Philadelphia Film Festival is not yet renowned outside of this city, and thank God for that. It’s unpretentious, easy to attend, and full of great movies. Lines for the first weekend’s big films began at the Film Society Center’s entrance near 14th and Chestnut and wrapped all the way around the corner of 15th, but, as at any good festival, the line was a part of the happening. Waiting for entry, strangers exchanged positive reviews of the opening night’s Wake Up Dead Man: a Knives Out Mystery and other early screenings. Younger festival-goers namedropped their favorite directors (“I just love Kelly Reichardt,” “I’m so excited for Park Chan-wook’s new movie”) while older ones referred to Bradley Cooper as “that guy from Philly.” The crowd is almost suspiciously good-natured. Negative remarks after one screening amounted to “my ass is sore” and “he really moves the camera a lot.” If the fans have snark, they’ve saved it for Letterboxd.

On the production end, the festival is meticulous. At the beginning of each screening, a member of the Film Society pep squad pumps up the audience for the movie on deck and leads a round of applause for sponsors, staff, merch, membership, and volunteers. The programmers have nailed the logistics of scheduling: open with the pop movie, close with a Cannes winner, slot the weird, sci-fi, horror, and schlock into late-night spots, and leave the 6pm showtimes for the respectables and could-be Oscar nominees. A daily email blast previews the day’s highlights, offers members free tickets for presumably under-purchased movies (in this year’s case, those starring Lucy Liu as an ailing mother and Sydney Sweeney as female boxer Christy Martin), and warns of traffic delays due to races and protests.

The Saturday afternoon screening of Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind coincided with Philadelphia’s “No Kings” protest, but there wasn’t much action to see from the Center, only a block-and-a-half’s walk from City Hall. A group of older attendees chatted about the protest (“I guess we’ll catch it on TV later”), but between protesting or seeing a film that ends in a scene of a protest, we’d all gone with option B. Would the movies confront us with our passivity? With two exceptions (Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia and Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident), this year’s Centerpieces looked away from live political and social issues. The big films still feel psychologically post-pandemic, wading through grief, loss, and the struggle for human connection. Even a film about an Italian president, Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, was more concerned with a teardrop in outer space than politics; its issues were euthanasia and criminal pardons, topics safe enough for a middle school curriculum.

This disconnect made exciting viewing out of those films that actually engaged with world affairs. Artem Ryzhykov’s A Simple Soldier is a first-person documentary of a Ukrainian cinematographer who enlists in the military in 2022 with no intention to fight; “my camera is my weapon,” he says. By 2024, he’s filming himself from underneath a pine-covered trench as he guns down Russian soldiers. He has a revision: “My camera is a toy.” In Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, an Iranian dissident kidnaps his former jailer and torturer. The very funny situational humor sometimes makes you feel as though you’ve escaped into a comedic play, until the film ends with a sound effect, source unseen, and you find yourself, like the hero, caught on the back foot, in the middle of a government-sponsored nightmare.