2022 ‘Өмір’ Directed by Emir Baigazin
Arman gets a job in the company for creation of audio and visual products: shooting and assembling of the celebration events. Some days later he causes the accidental deletion of all material, which his company has been working on. He is allowed for some days to find money in order to restore all material or indemnify the company for the losses.
Omir, Жизнь
Canada
Canada
The director didn’t show up for the Q&A, which is good because I think the (remaining) audience would have beaten the living shit out of him.
~ Toronto International Film Festival #6 ~
From the kaleidoscopic mind of Kazakh filmmaker Emir Baigazin comes this modern fable about the meaning of life and what really matters, told through a story about a tech company that digitizes memories but suffers a catastrophic data loss.
In Kazakhstan’s largest city of Almaty, soft-spoken and heavy-hearted Arman (Yerkebulan Tasynov) hides his alcoholism and depression with the best of them. He is the CEO of a modern corporation that specializes in digitalization of memories, precious (though, let’s be realistic, rarely revisited) photos and videos of births, graduations, weddings, holidays, memorials, and all the special moments in between.
On the verge of personal bankruptcy and at the mercy of his reluctantly pregnant girlfriend (Karina Huramshina), who relentlessly demands only the…
Deplorable psudo philosophies.. such an insulting watch..
A very disjointed and narrativley excessive films to come out in a while. The length is not rewarding when by the next abstract tableau nothing is said.. no standing philosophies just a work that I feel didn't know what it wanted to be. Each fade to black I was prayinggg it was over but it kept going. No need to ever extend it to such lengths especially if you're gonna shift from realizm to "experimental" 30 mins in the random abstract moments are nothing but numbing lol..
Anyway yea not a fan of this one..
I don't know. I just don't know. Some of the scenes looked fantastic but after a lucid first 40 minutes, having 2+ hours of abstract imagery with voiceovers constantly talking about what is important in life started to feel hollow and frustrating fast. It was clear that the subtitles lost some things in translation as well. Not that it would've made much of a difference. I felt slightly bad for laughing at the "child singing gibberish" subtitle.
hmmmm lol not sure about this one. i like the life-affirming message it's trying to get across, but i don't think it was woven into the narrative well enough. the events are a total jumble and the sound design is jarring. maybe that's the point bc the character is going through a crisis but idk. it started off okay but then i was pretty much just like "wtf" for the rest of the movie. the nightmarish sequences were kinda cool though. and lmao at me thinking this was going to be a sci-fi film just from reading the tiff description
The devil doesn’t come, he waits.
Arman is in the business of digitizing and perfecting memories for people to use in the afterlife. Since Arman can’t even satisfy his own or his wife’s demands in real life, he falls far short of what clients are demanding for eternity. Arman’s boss, a mobster, threatens to bury him alive unless he improves his output, and when Arman inevitably falls short of this goal, he descends into a death spiral of borrowed, half-baked memories and nightmares from his clients.
This profound, cerebral, deep, prolonged, and bizarre vision of the future demands full attention. The director was a no-show for the world premiere of his film at the Toronto International Film Festival and it…
quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen
interminable: an absolute drag past the first ~40 minutes
beautiful in the way that mediocre stock photography is beautiful
has nothing insightful to say about life or technology (phones r bad)
Film 4 of TIFF 2022
Rush lined this one, thinking it was sci-if and also cool to witness a real Kazakhstani film! Bought 2 beers to reward myself after a tough old volunteer shift of watching movies, and strapped in. Fell asleep a bit at the start after the beers, and woke up worried I’d missed something, but turns out this was the perfect film to nap without losing much. It’s three hours long, and absolutely does not make any narrative sense whatsoever. Kept wishing each of the 98 fade-to-blacks was the final fade, from around the 56th one. I mean, they go balls to the wall with it all, all very bizarre, but my patience and good-will ran out as it kept bouncing around for 90 minutes longer than it should have. Lots of great film festival reactions in the crowd!
Saw this at the Tokyo International Film Festival, mainly because I admire Baigazin’s previous work. This, however, was painful to watch in the worst way. Meaningless and two hours too long. That could’ve been the statement about “Life”, but by the end of it I couldn’t care less. I began to weep while watching, not because I was moved, but because the film would just not end. A film entitled “Life” genuinely made me want to die. I only regret that I stayed till the end of the film to find at least one redeeming quality. Excessive budget for little payout. I’m sorry but this film traumatized me and I don’t wish this experience on anyone.
to get this out of the way and to respond to another review: yes 100% you lose very funny/interesting nuance and tone to the english subtitles. they were dogshit and im not even 100% fluent in russian. that being said, nothing justifies its runtime, and those slow-motion shots that transition every vignette were extremely distracting and looked laughable. i liked how the movie switched around from being earnest to abstract to shocking, but nothing about the message was coherent from scene to scene. next time, make 3 different movies about life instead trying to cram everything into one fucking slideshow presentation.
still enjoyed, that scene at the mental hospital was incredible and i saw my russian father cry for maybe the 4th time ever.
(TIFF #2)
