ZagrebDox Films/1
Modern Times! Two films to reflect upon, both shot with a cell phone: Bosnian director Nedzad Begovic has made ”A Cell Phone Movie” (photo), and ”People I Could have Been and Maybe am” by Dutch Boris Gerrets.
The latter has been awarded at several festivals worldwide and is a nervous, in style, journey that takes the director and his camera, or should I write cell phone, to meet different characters, who live on the edge of society. He gets close to them, falls in love with one, a Brazilian woman, leaves them, comes back, all in a chaptered narrative with texts that update the situations and the development for the persons involved. It is all very pretentious and egocentered and constructed.
Whereas Begovic, who also made ”Totally Personal”, presents a wonderful playful personal essay about himself, a man in his fifties who starts to get health problems and uses his cell phone to communicate with family and friends, well to the whole world, in this film that shows what you can shoot with your cell phone, and what not. The film surprises its audience, it has a lot of these small moments that life is full of, Begovic has filmed grafitti sentences on walls that he has met on his way – like ”go and fuck your mother’s slippers”!!! – there are sequences that perform as a kind of video art, it is in other words a fresh piece of entertainment, sometimes crazy, sometimes dealing with serious problems, humorous. It must have a long festival life!
