The Idealism Cycle

My arguments with my parents all but inevitably end up as clashes between idealism and practicality. It almost makes narrative sense. I’m the inexperienced youngster with naïve and harmful ideas about reshaping the world and they’re the wise and seasoned elders who have done the work of trying to shape the world for years. Or, they’re the people who’ve gotten so dulled by the grind of trying to cultivate trees that they’ve ended up missing the forest. And since I’m the idealistic one in this scenario let me say that I’m glad we’re moving away from the background radiation of cynicism that pervaded youth culture in the past decade and change. If there’s a chance the second narrative is right we need all the idealists and optimists we can get, if only so they can became the pessimistically practical older generation that dilutes the undercooked ideas of the next. 

Slow West (2015)

Maybe we should make up a new genre? Maybe it can be called the neo-Western. Then again, I can't help but feel the word "acid" should be in there somewhere.

Anywho, Slow West shares the same odd lineage of movies like Dead Man and Jauja. From the former comes the racial commentary and cheeky sense of humor and from the latter comes the bright, colorful palette. And though it's clearly the least of the three it's still a refreshing and sprightly little film. It has to be to earn those comparisons.

What makes these three movies seem of a piece is the degree of abstraction they use when fooling around with Western iconography. While the Spaghetti Western of Sergio Leone distills and concentrates the genre to a heightened mythicality, these movies move a step further. Their "West" and its attending tropes aren't mythologized versions of real world things. They're primarily metaphors. Where Leone uses the iconography to evoke an intensified emotional scale, these movies use the iconography for symbolic significance and cultural baggage. The end results are something like essays on the Western as filtered through tone poems. So far, I'm really into them.

Unfriended (2014)

Dead Teenager Movie

Dead Teenager Movies are weird. They're a genre of fiction where unpleasant young characters are created so they can be killed in entertaining or affecting ways. It requires a weird kind of small empathetic leap to enjoy those stories. As someone who watches horror movies regularly my empathetic leaping muscles are pretty well toned. And that's probably why certain horror movies work more effectively on me when they ask the audience to confront their ability to make the leap. My go-to example is Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which, as Bill Ryan says in his Letterboxd review, may be the saddest horror movie ever made. Part of the sadness comes from a fairly simple realization: the charming, interesting and occasionally spooky TV series I liked required this to happen so that I could watch and enjoy it. The movie asks the audience: this character was subjected to pain so that this story could happen, will you confront yourself with a discomfiting and draining depiction of that pain? It's pretty rare that a movie is willing to do that and I greatly appreciate it when I find it in other horror stories.

Unfriended does something similar, if much less intense, in its own found-footage-horror kind of way. The opening few minutes, where Blaire (Shelley Henning) watches a video of her friend Laura Barnes (Heather Sossaman) commit suicide, has a harsh and angry degree of verisimilitude. The shaky, grainy nature of the video, its lack of overt gore and the way Blaire clicks away from it before it finishes adds an uncomfortable weight of realism to the scene. The ones that follow turn away from this to indulge in a bunch of standard slasher tropes as we're introduced to our cast of expendable meat.

But even as the movie settles into a more traditional horror vein, the earlier verisimilitude lingers in the background (quite literally) as the gimmick. And it is a gimmick. There's no way "what if a slasher movie but on somebody's laptop" isn't a gimmick. But it is a very, very well realized one. The verisimilitude of that recreation is not only formally exciting but sells the early scenes of unease as common features of Facebook and Skype refuse to work the ways we know they do.    

After a point, however, the movie has to escalate and that's where the trouble begins. The death scenes simply don't play as goofy fun or tense and sickening. Instead they sit somewhat awkwardly in the middle. Though this would be a death-knell for most other slashers but here it serves to refocus attention on the emotional fallout of the spookiness, which is really where Unfriended seems to place its bets. The most common image in the movie is the Skype window with close-ups of each of the cast freaking out on their webcams. Even with the several layers of distancing granted by all the other horror movies I’ve seen before the concentration of this much emotional distress ends up working to the point where I came to empathize with the characters even if I didn’t come to care about them. This empathy had the knock-on effect of increasing the impact of each of the movie’s twists as they came down the pipe as I bought the emotional fallout of each of the revelations even if I rolled my eyes a bit at their extreme-ness. And that’s how a not-scary horror movie can hold you mesmerized for 82 minutes.

Also, something something I wonder if we enjoy horror movie karma for its extreme sense of overblown justice something something.

Speak, Memory: Recreating History in A Moment of Innocence

Note: Blame D. A. Hollingsworth for making me post this boring college essay that I half-assed this morning 

As a young man Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (along with a few friends) attacked a policeman to try and get his gun. The attempt ended in disaster. After stabbing the policeman Makhmalbaf and his friends were unable to wrest away his gun. In the ensuing chaos Makhmalbaf was shot and detained. He served a five-year sentence in prison for the crime and was eventually freed when the 1979 Iranian revolution brought the Islamic regime to power. Years later Makhmalbaf was reacquainted with the policeman involved and decided to make a movie about the incident. The result is 1996’s A Moment of Innocence, a movie that tries to recreate this moment of personal history but quickly devolves into a playful examination of memory, identity, change and representation. The film follows Makhmalbaf, the policeman and the actors chosen to represent their younger selves as they attempt to get at the slippery “truth” of that day. The effort culminates in the final scene[1] where all the agents are finally brought together in the re-enactment.

The significance of this scene is two-fold. First, it is important simply because it is the ending. As Peter Brooks puts it: “[speaking on Sartre in Les Mots] He began to live his life retrospectively, in terms of the death that alone would confer meaning and necessity on existence… All narration is obituary in that life acquires definable meaning only at, and through, death… the end is recognition which retrospectively illuminates beginning and middle…”[2] Or, to put it in more simple narrative terms that directly relates to movies: “THE ENDING IS THE CONCEIT.”[3] In this way the ending allows us to hone and reconsider the events leading up to it and influences our reading and understanding of the film.

The second reason for the scene’s significance is that the scene, as filmed, is what the film has, ostensibly, been trying to do. It is the final result of an attempt to capture the incident on film. And, in keeping with the film’s flirtation with reflexive questions of truth and how “truth” can be depicted in cinema, the retelling isn’t straightforward. Instead the scene emerges as a sudden moment of spontaneity where parts that are supposed to fit easily into a re-enactment of history suddenly break away from the confines of the “truth” to create something new and unusual – a moment of innocence, as the film’s English title suggests. Of course, in this age of skeptical media consumption, we assume that what is captured on film is the intentional result of the movie’s writers and directors and not a “real” incident that transpired. After all, without the consent of the filmmakers that scene would not be exist in the form that it does. The movie is genuinely aware of the artificiality of this supposed re-enactment and actively plays into the reading of the scene as fictional. In the film this is reflected by a shift in the movie’s tone in the final scene to one that seems equally inspired by the French New Wave and (surprisingly) Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.

The French New Wave is a rather simple and easy touchstone for any work of art cinema, regardless of national boundaries. Some of this is the fault of historical circumstance. The French New Wave was the most notable cinematic movement in the West to use film techniques that could be replicated on lower budgets with cheap equipment. French New Wave movies often used handheld camerawork, location shooting, playful formal trickery and a way of filmmaking that emphasized cinema’s ability to create texts similar to essays. Many of these elements are also common to much of Iranian art cinema and are, likewise, present throughout most of A Moment of Innocence. What is, perhaps, different about the Iranian cinema’s use of these ideas is the ways in which these ideas have often been adapted to foreground questions of truth and authenticity. While Brechtian film techniques – stylistic choices that would make us aware of the artificial construction of the movie’s sound and image – are common to many French New Wave films they are largely absent from many Iranian art films. The reason for this seems to be the ambiguity between truth and fiction that seems such an important thematic concern for many directors of the Iranian new wave such as Abbas Kiarostami (Close-Up, Ten, Certified Copy, Shirin), Jafar Panahi (Taxi, This is Not a Film, The White Balloon) and Samira Makhmalbaf (The Apple). The use of Brechtian elements in these films would call attention to the artifice of the productions, detracting from their power as texts of ambiguous “truth”. In the final scene of A Moment of Innocence, however, Makhmalbaf embraces this technique in both overt and subtle ways. Of the subtler cues the most obvious is the score. For most of the film scenes have largely played out in silence, lending the proceedings a slight air of realism. After all, three decades of Steven Spielberg and John Williams’s domination of the international box office has taught audiences to be wary of the manipulative tendency of film music. The final scene, however, is all ominous chanting and percussion with the dramatic bleat of horns underscoring the close-up of the bread hiding the knife[4][5] and the occasional flute shriek to heighten the tension. On the more overt side of the equation is the freeze-frame that ends the film which cannot help but remind us of the most infamous freeze-frame in history – the final shot of The 400 Blows, one of the quintessential films of the French New Wave.

But the final scene’s cinematic reference (another hallmark of the French New Wave) is as much Clint Eastwood as Truffaut. The scene plays out a bit like the climax of a Western - A long, stretch of (mostly) empty road where the three characters meet for their final showdown, with one of them nervously caressing his gun. The specific influence, however, seems to be the infamous Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone. From Ennio Morricone’s music comes the score’s chanting opening (the vocals of Morricone’s L'estasi dell'Oro) , the nervous percussion (Il Triello , by the same composer) and the romantic theme that plays over the credits. The music also seems to share a mite of its DNA Sato Masaru’s score for Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, the film that was re-made into A Fistful of Dollars, Eastwood’s first Leone Western. The visual cues from Leone are also evident in the shot selection – close-ups and inserts – that lead up to the show down. The editing cross-cuts between close-ups of the actors’ faces, the gun and the bread hiding the knife in much the same way as the finale of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. 

Why would Makhmalbaf and company choose a Spaghetti Western as their reference point? It has to do with the genre’s particular relation to ideas of truth. Even by the standards of the Western (a dubiously historic genre if there ever was one) the Spaghetti Westerns are decidedly non-realistic. Leone, arguably the most important of the Spaghetti Western filmmakers, made films on broad, giant canvases that emphasize the size and scope of their images. His close-ups are extreme, focusing on such tiny details as a drop of sweat falling across the forehead set against the vast flat background of the desert. They are mythical. Giant (and obvious) fictions. The movies don’t just reject reality, they embrace their artificiality to heighten their drama. When the style of those movies is applied to something as small, personal and “realistic” as A Moment of Innocence the artificial nature of the re-enactment’s construction is brought into even sharper contrast. This allows the final moment of the “draw”, when one boy holds out a flower and the other a piece of bread, to read as a decidedly authentic gesture. In that moment the young actor playing the policeman rejects the historical truth and the desires of the man he portrays to create a new ending to the incident, one that he feels to be “right”.

So let us return once more to the question of the ending as the conceit. As the movie’s last word on the topic the ending carries a particularly heavy burden in the act of interpretation. Thus the “moment of innocence” in which the actor playing the young policeman rejects the “truth” to create a different fiction allows us a wealth of interpretive possibilities. One possible reading is that the ending directly confronts the subjectivity nature of history. Throughout the film the policeman has taught his younger counterpart how to “be” himself. For the purpose of authenticity he tells the boy a story about why the day was important to him. On the day that he was stabbed the policeman had hoped to profess his love to the girl who would ask him for the time every day. He had tried to present her with a flower as a symbol of his love several times, but had been too nervous to do so. To the policeman the day’s story is one where he loses an opportunity at love when Makhmalbaf attacks him and he never sees the girl again. To emphasize this aspect in the film the policeman buys a flower and makes the young actor practice chickening out of giving the girl the flower. Later on, when the policeman realizes that the girl had been a friend of Makhmalbaf’s who was a part of the attack, he storms off and asks the young actor to “shoot” the girl in the film when she asks for the time. He seems to believe that erasing his humiliation of the event with a reflection of his anger at the betrayal would allow him to achieve some form of peace or justice. However, the young actor – the chosen vessel of his revenge – also has a perspective on the events and he struggles with this and his loyalty to the policeman in that final scene. Eventually he decides that instead of following the historical re-creation or the policeman’s revisionist slant that he would change the story by doing what the policeman could never do – offer the girl the flower. In this way, through the perspective of the policeman the movie expresses the depth of subjectivity present in most attempts to depict history. The desire of the young actor to change history, in a way that rejects the real occurrence and the policeman’s revisionist take thus emphasizes the difficulty of arriving at historical “truth” through recreation and asks the question whether that “truth” is worth preserving and reproducing.

In an interview for Close Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present and Future says “…it is impossible to arrive at description, since description can only apply to what which is dead – when the subject is living and ever changing, how can we define its limits? ”. The ending of A Moment of Innocence seems like an explication on this point. In attempting to describe the incident through mere re-enactment the Makhmalbaf of the movie proves incredibly naïve. Because the incident involved people who remember it through their limited perspective and the re-enactment involves actors who interpret the incident through their experiences the historical cannot be adequately “described”. In this way the incident remains a living, changing entity that proves impossible to pin down and though the movie tries it never quite gets there. Then again, that’s all on purpose.

The Whole Damn Thing Awards - 2014, Part II

And now, we return once again to our 2014 The Whole Damn Thing Awards. Just in time too. I think I hear the crowd getting restless. Let's kick things off with the award for Achievement in Sound Design. The nominees are:

Goodbye to Language 3D, for loud wet fart noises in the midst of snooty discussion

The Babadook, for turning an absurd sounding phrase into the most unnerving sound byte of the year

The Strange Little Cat, for burning the impressionistic feeling of a cramped, loud family straight into your brain

…and the award goes to…

The Strange Little Cat!

What movie made the best use of montage? It’s time to find out with the award for Achievement in Editing. The nominees are:

Ramon Zurcher for The Strange Little Cat, for creating everyday rhythms of particular intensity

Sandra Adair for Boyhood, for the particular difficulties in paring down an assload of material into coherence

Mathilde Bonnefoy for Citizenfour, for generating tension within the confines of a hotel room

Jean-Christophe Hym for Stranger By the Lake, for molding an episodic narrative into chapters instead of chunks

…and the Whole Damn Thing goes to…

Ramon Zurcher for The Strange Little Cat!

And now we turn to the award for Best Screenplay. This year’s nominees are:

Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness for The Grand Budapest Hotel, for crafting a delightful desert of a comedy with enough darkness that it lingers

Isao Takahata and Riko Sakaguchi for The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, for navigating its material between modern humanism and ancient mysticism, giving neither the edge

Abderrahmane Sissako and Kessen Tall for Timbuktu, for being furious but never simplistic

Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer for Under the Skin, for abandoning its concrete source to embrace abstraction

Lisandro Alonso and Fabian Casas for Jauja, for creating scenes of unusual originality and vitality

…and The Whole Damn Thing goes to…

Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness for The Grand Budapest Hotel!

Moving right along we come to the heart of the medium – the visuals. These are the nominees for Best Cinematography:

Emmanuel Lubezki for Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Being Ignorant), for creating a continuous series of shots that are as, if not more effective than a traditionally made film

Sofian El Fani for Timbuktu, for using the width of the frame to create tension, drama and beauty

Dick Pope for Mr. Turner, for using digital cinema to create impressionistic natural landscapes and textured character scenes alike

Fabrice Aragno for Goodbye to Language 3D, for pushing the limits of beauty, ugliness and cinema on low grade consumer video and 3D

Timo Salminen for Jauja, for creating a fantastic landscape of wonder, humor and the unexpected in a 4:3 aspect ratio

…and the award goes to…

Fabrice Aragno for Goodbye to Language 3D!

And now we get down to the big five. Who will take home the glory? Well, first, we shall be presenting the award for Best Supporting Actress. The nominees are:

Agata Kulesza in Ida, for creating fierceness out of pain without ever having to shout

Patricia Arquette in Boyhood, for being the movie’s rock that you don’t even notice until you do

Gaby Hoffman in Obvious Child, for being the earthiest and most practical best friend ever

Anjorka Strechel in The Strange Little Cat, for being playful and vicious and bored and silly in the course of a performance and have it all be bounded in character

Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game, for livening up a deadly dull production and elevating both its comedic and dramatic moments

…and the winner is…

Agata Kulesza in Ida!

Now, for their male counterparts. The nominees for Best Supporting Actor are:

Patrick D’Assumcao in Stranger by the Lake, for simultaneously embodying wisdom and deep discomfort as the only traditionally hefty man on a gay cruising beach

Edward Norton in Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), for a versatile chameleonic performance that flits from emotion to emotion in virtuoso fashion

Lam Suet in The Midnight After, for doing his typical warm, earthy buffoon shtick but now with an axe

Bradley Cooper in Guardians of the Galaxy, for navigating comedy and difficult emotional territory while also being a talking raccoon

Will Arnett in The Lego Movie, for being one of the best Batmen

…and the award goes to…

Patrick D’Assumcao for Stranger by the Lake!

The nominees for Best Lead Actor are:

David Oyelowo in Selma, for playing an icon as a human first and a leader second but never as a tired piece of history

Ralph Fiennes in The Grand Budapest Hotel, for the most perfect swearing in ages

Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, for the most diverse and expressive grunting ever caught on film

Michael Keaton in Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), for navigating the emotional registers in a film that gazes longer and more intensely than the Panopticon

Viggo Mortenson in Jauja, for bringing tired and bewildered texture to the figure of Ethan Edwards better than John Wayne ever did

…and The Whole Damn Thing goes too…

Ralph Fiennes for The Grand Budapest Hotel!

The nominees for Best Lead Actress are:

Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, for honing the inhuman into a mythic unknown

Jennifer Kent in The Babadook, for being both the hero and the villain with equal dedication and effectiveness

Tilda Swinton in Only Lovers Left Alive, for elevating the romantic Gothic vampire to its pinnacle

Agata Trzebuchowska in Ida, for weathering the great forces against her and swaying only when she wants to

Jenny Schily in The Strange Little Cat, for being completely open and deeply closed all at once

…and the award goes to…

Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin!

Who stayed steadiest at the helm? The nominations for Best Director are:

Jean-Luc Godard for Goodbye to Language 3D, for being an experimental enfant-terrible who still manages to explode the cinema and people’s minds

Ramon Zurcher for The Strange Little Cat, for the most perfect debut of the year

Laura Poitras for Citizenfour, for bravery and talent of equal measure

Lisandro Alonso for Jauja, for the most delightful surprises of the year

Isao Takahata for The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, for the running scene, the procession from the moon and every other portion of this movie

Jonathan Glazer for Under the Skin, for a unique and terrifying vision of the other

Abderrahmane Sissako for Timbuktu, for the patience, intelligence and anger that pulse through every scene

…and the winner is…

Jean-Luc Godard for Goodbye to Language 3D!

And, finally, we present the moment you’ve all been waiting for… the nominees for Best Picture are:

Goodbye to Language 3D, for challenging cinema to be brave and new and exciting

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, for the most emotional climax of the year

Jauja, for the evocation of a dream landscape of strange and intense potency

Manakamana, for having nothing and everything all at once

The Grand Budapest Hotel, for both the bitter and the sweet

Mr. Turner, for embedding the artist in the social milieu without puffing up his stature

Under the Skin, for a vision of abstract discomfort and alien emotion

…and the Whole Damn Thing goes to…

The Grand Budapest Hotel!!!

Well, the Cinecdoche Academy of Motion Fiction Arts and Sciences is delighted to have completed its first year of The Whole Damn Thing Awards. We hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have. Have a good night and remember to fall in love at the movies. Goodbye!

An Intermission

Before we move on to the final ten The Whole Damn Thing awards, let's pause for a word from our sponsors:

The Whole Damn Thing Awards - 2014, Part I

Welcome to the first ever Whole Damn Thing Awards where the Cinecdoche Academy of Motion Fiction Arts and Sciences award those movies we think deserved it. The rules are fairly simple: eligibility, the number of nominees and pretty much everything else is left to the discretion of the Academy. The Academy will, however, attempt to steer clear of categories it has absolutely no idea about (which includes the three short film categories and the distinctions between Sound Editing and Sound Mixing and Original and Adapted Screenplay). Let’s get the proceedings underway.

First, for Achievement in Hair and Make-Up the nominees are:

Inherent Vice, for creating a distillation of imagined ‘70s Los Angeles and its attendant cultures with precision and wit

The Grand Budapest Hotel, for creating a fictional world with an astonishing degree of character and specificity

Foxcatcher, for giving essential shape and direction to the three central performances

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I, for creating a viral sensation in the creation of Natalie Dormer’s hairstyle

Under the Skin, for sculpting the form of its lead actress to best exemplify its themes

And the Whole Damn Thing goes to….

Under the Skin!

For Achievement in Visual Effects the nominees are

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for taking the art of motion capture to newer and more impressive heights

Under the Skin, for creating spaces unknown to the human eye with astonishing fidelity

Goodbye to Language 3D, for its inspired manipulation of the cinematic frame and everything that fits in it

The Grand Budapest Hotel, for using wit and charm that reflects its thematic ideals

…and the winner is…

Goodbye to Language 3D!

We now turn to a lighter category, one that is possibly very incorrect about its nominees - Best Original Song. The nominees in this category are

“Everything is Awesome” by Tegan and Sara ft. The Lonely Island in The Lego Movie, for being the most cheerful earworm to emerge this year from the movies

“Glory” by John Legend and Common from Selma, for crafting a powerful anthem of hope and activism

"Unknown Song" from Timbuktu, for creating a sonic landscape that offers human resistance to religious totalitarianism

"Unknown Song" from A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, for a howl that embraces the abyss

…and the winner is…

"Unknown Song" from Timbuktu!

While we linger on music, let us move on to the award for Best Original Score. Our nominees are:

Alexandre Desplat for The Grand Budapest Hotel, for creating a score that embraces whimsy and charm while never losing sight of its melancholy

Micah Levi for Under the Skin, for building a bewildering, tense and unnerving sense of dread throughout

Antonio Sanchez for Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), for a pulsing, propulsive beat that careens us from scene to scene

Joe Hisaishi for The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, for navigating the disparate emotions of an old folk tale with resonance and honesty

…and the winner is…

Alexandre Desplat for The Grand Budapest Hotel! While the other nominees certainly created memorable, haunting works Desplat’s score moves through a cavalcade of emotions with sprightly elegance while never seeming to break a sweat. Just delightful.

Our next award is for Achievement in Production Design. The nominees are:

The Strange Little Cat, for decorating an apartment with all the messy ephemera of real life

The Grand Budapest Hotel, for creating an entire world that is as much Looney Tunes as it is Lubitsch

The Babadook, for the best children’s book ever

The Lego Movie, for being loud, brash and proud

The Missing Picture, for the depth of emotion it plumbs using handmade still lives

…and the winner is…

The Missing Picture!

Now we move on to the award for Achievement in Costume Design. The nominees are:

Inherent Vice, for recreating the textures of color and ugliness that are ‘70s fashions

Jauja, for making period costumes look rich, colorful and profoundly uncomfortable

Under the Skin, for creating one iconic costume image

Guardians of the Galaxy, for creating a wide variety of looks to inhabit the universe

The Grand Budapest Hotel, for the delightful cheekiness of its precision in creating characters

…and the winner is…

The Grand Budapest Hotel!

Next we come to the special feature categories. To start, Best Animated Feature. The nominees are:

The Lego Movie, for an avalanche of jokes that culminate in an emotionally satisfying finale

The Wind Rises, for embracing the ambiguity of artistic expression in complex political climates

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, for creating a fable that remains true to its history and culture but loses none of its resonance

…and the winner is…

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya!

Our next category is Best Documentary Feature. The nominees are:

The Missing Picture, for telling a story that deserves to be heard

What Now? Remind Me, for inviting us to live as close to a person as is possible in the cinematic medium

Citizenfour, for elevating its essential political discourse with eerie and terrifying images

Manakamana, for giving us the time and space to think about all that is important

Private Violence, for humanizing a political issue with a gut punch

…and the winner is…

Manakamana!

The final special mention award of the night, Best Non-English Feature. The nominees are:

Goodbye to Language 3D, for inventing new ways of looking at cinema and being obnoxious and grouchy about it

Jauja, for creating a fairy tale world filled with humor, beauty and surprise

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, for telling a story as universal as it is specific and strange

The Strange Little Cat, for evoking the truest sensation of what it feels like to live in an apartment

The Midnight After, for couching its commentary on Hong Kong society in the wondrous and the weird

…and the winner is…

Jauja!

The Academy has just announced the remaining The Whole Damn Thing award winners! Find out who takes Best Director, Actress, Picture and more here!