The Second Weekend

Parting Shot (Pas Douce), which literally translates into "not soft," takes the viewer on a ride from desperation to joy, without adornment and apology.

The French title describes the main character Fred the way one lover describes her when he says during their lovemaking (if you can call it that), "Couldn't you be more tender?" She's hard to like at first, but as all good film does, she slowly transforms into someone I'd like to befriend.

Director Jeanne Waltz adeptly and starkly tells a story worth telling, of true redemption and forgiveness. A lot of the action takes place in a hospital, but it evokes images of what Americans imagined Soviet hospitals looked like in the 1980s. The sets were spare when they weren't decorated by mother nature herself. It allows, I think, the viewer to focus on the characters and story.

Worth going out of your way to see.

Faces of a Fig Tree (Ichijiku No Kao), directed by Kaori Momoi, is based on the popular serialized novel of the same name.

Momoi uses strange camera angles and clashing color themes to tell four stories of one family, perhaps as seen from a fig tree that follows them through the disjointed narrative. Both the fig tree and the art director's color choices were almost characters in and of themselves.

I almost walked out because it was hard to follow, but I'm glad I stayed. The film contained four separate stories, and once it got beyond the first one, the characters came alive.

Finally, It Happened Just Before uses a fictional technique to tell the true stories of women who survived human trafficking.

A male taxi-driver, a female diplomat, a female villager, and a male bordello bartender each narrate one woman's story as they go about their daily lives in Austria. The country-of-origin and location of enslavement were hidden, and the stories were told as if they had taken place in Austria and Germany.

The technique creates a narrative distance so the horrific circumstances might be easier to to take. And it allows the viewer to use his or her own imagination, which might be far more vivid than the filmmaker could recreate.

The most disquieting story was the one told by the bartender. I didn't realize it was a bordello until he hung a poster behind a stripper pole and cleaned the rooms upstairs. And I was surprised that the only story that made me cry was the one where the woman managed to escape her captors.

Director Anja Salomonowitz also layers the storytelling over more mundane sounds (in one, a chorus, in another, an herbal supplement party) to contrast the alarming stories to everyday life.

One note for English-speaking people: spoken German with English subtitles also creates further narrative distance, and it made me wonder what it would be like to see the same film produced in the US.

All of the cases in the film highlighted abuse based on immigration status, which can leave people feeling vulnerable. If you think this doesn't happen in the United States, you're wrong about that. US Immigration officials extort money and sex from immigrants in exchange for granting immigration privileges.

Tonight: Operation Filmmaker