DRIFT

Showings

Roxie Theatre Thu, Feb 13, 2014 7:00 PM
Film Info
Director:Benny Vandendriessche
Film Category:Narrative
Running Time:83
Country:Belgium
Netherlands
Year of Release:2013
Premiere:US Premiere

Description

A Belgian couple waits in an empty hotel in the Carpathian mountains of post-Communist Romania. She suffers from an illness. He helps her find her peace. Left alone, he escapes reality and starts to wander. Drift explores his quest for salvation on a mythical journey through a barren, rural wasteland. Fighting his memories, the drifting man chooses not to speak and to lose himself in an animal-like, primitive existence. His simple but painful rituals echo an ancient culture long forgotten. Director Benny Vandendriessche’s feature debut.

Drift is an inspired combination of narrative cinema and performance art, telling a story through the physical presence of its main character. Exploring the ambiguity between beauty and pain, the filmmakers create a powerful experience through the tactile, physical world -- instead of a traditional narrative tension. Since the early 1990’s, leading actor (Dirk Hendrikx) has been working as an artist in the area where installation, film and performance art overlap. Whether on stage, in a studio or outdoors, Hendrikx’s ideas always involve a strong physical interaction between himself and surroundings.

Hendrikx’s body is the main tool in Drift to express emotion. There is little dialogue; only big silences full of visceral poetry. Fans of Andrei Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr will enjoy this atmospheric experience.
-Jeff M. Giordano