wood and water (w&d jonas bak)

This is one of those films that might be a gem, or might be utterly self-indulgent, probably depending on your mood as you enter the cinema. A grandmother, Anke, retires from her job in the church. She goes to visit her son, Max, in Hong Kong. Max never shows up. She wanders the streets of Hong Kong during the days of the umbrella protests, slipping by on the margin, someone who is on the edge of not only the world, but even her own world. She returns to her home in the Black Forest. Time has passed. Seismic events occur, but we are just spectators. The meta aspect of all this is that the director is using his own grandmother to play the grandmother, and the cast is made up of much of his family. Which smells to an extent of cinema-as-gestalt, and perhaps contributes to the sense that the whole project is somewhat contrived. There are some beguiling sequences, such as the encounter between Anke and the Hong Kong porter, but it’s hard to tell if the parts of this movie add up to a whole.