(Duck Season, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession)
If it weren’t for the fact that most teenage boys wouldn’t be caught dead with their mums in a public outing, Duck Season might have been the perfect mother-son movie. But let’s just say it is anyway. Anyone who’s ever been young, male and fourteen knows that whenever the parents left you an empty house, you partied like it was 1999. Fernando Eimbcke’s made a film about just that: being home, alone, and still young enough to know that you’ve got to make the most of it.

Two boys, Flama and Moko, begin their Sunday with a game of Halo and 2 litres of Coke. Soon enough, next-door neighbour Rita is skimping on their kitchen utilities while pizza deliveryman Ulises won’t budge because they won’t pay. So much for the customer being right. Before long, Ulises is challenging the boys to a videogame football match of monumental proportions, but the dramatic score line and their small trades dispute is set in limbo by the most untimely of power cuts. Meanwhile, Rita’s cooking more than just a cake, and tasting more than just the ingredients…

Eimbcke’s obviously been a 14-year-old before, and understands not only the muggy confinement on being imprisoned in an urban apartment complex, but that being a teenager means the world is getting closer, whether you want it to or not. By the end of the day, the foursome have migrated like the ducks in the living room painting – they’ve chosen to move on in one way or another – and it’s in this episodic passage through the seasons of change that makes this film a coming-of-age bloomer like no other. Quaint, funny and spaaacious (like the film got a taste of Rita’s “brownies” or something), you won’t find a more enjoyable offering at the festival this year. Plus a heads-up to those still yet to the see the movie: stay put until the end credits.

In Z: Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, a migration of a cultural sort is taking place. It’s a warts ‘n’ all document of the rise and fall of maverick programmer Jerry Harvey, who single-handedly engineered the major contextual shift of movies from the projected to the broadcasted realm. Someone was bound to do it eventually, but that Harvey did it with such crazed, zealous lunacy made his television network a goldmine, film archive and talent incubator all rolled into one. Viewers could first subscribe to the Z Channel service during the mid-70s, and upon its demise in the late 80s, Harvey’s programming idiosyncrasies have yet to be matched by any film-orientated cable channel since.

Today, the way in which we view movies has dramatically changed, and the methods in which we do so now begs the question: whether it’s time for a remigration back to the cinema. Whereas the spawn of DVD is essential in preserving and proliferating much of the eclectic and obscure filmmaking Harvey cradled, the bigger techo-picture is less encouraging: namely, movie-going is now conducted more and more in the home, and increasingly, on a computer screen. If Harvey were still alive, he’d notice that people no longer prefer to go to the movies; that they’ll rent it or worse, download it instead; that a generation of film buffs have grown up experiencing cinema within the tube of a 25” set. Isolated south of the rest of the world, the problem is perhaps even more pronounced for us than we think. Nigh on two weeks of festival trawling, it’s become crystal clear to me that cinema (particularly all the retrospective stuff) belongs in a theatre; that it's exhibitional; that it's Big and Live and meant to unfold; that it’s mobilised by the physical body of an audience. How you get people back into the foyers, I don’t know, but if we had something akin to a “Z Theatre” – a juiced-up MoMA or Film Forum, more or less – I know it’d be a start.—TW