Lee, Ghobadi rock with music-themed films

Once again taking a genre jump, Lee, who has made thematically as diverse films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain, Sense & Sensibility, The Hulk and Lust, Caution, literally rocked the festival’s Competition section through his peek into the backdrop of the iconic 1969 music festival in New York state’s Greenwich village.

The film, with its comic tone, gave the much-needed lighter touch to the Competition section of the festival where violent and edgy films are a dominating factor this time.

Based on Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, A Concert, and a Life, the memoirs of Elliot Tiber, the man who inadvertently played a big role in making the Woodstock festival a reality, the film is a great humane tale about relationships, struggles and innocence of youth with the festival forming an overwhelming backdrop.

For Lee, this is his tribute to the “innocence of a young generation”. As he told the media here after the screening: “It is the ‘can do’ innocence of that generation that is the most important aspect of the story.”

Ghobadi’s No One Knows the Persian Cats, which opened the official Un Certain Regard section, is also about the power of music, but it is a complete contrast to Lee’s work in theme, treatment and scope.

It focuses on the underground music scene of Iran, and is the result of Ghobadi’s study of the music groups there after his earlier film Half Moon was banned by the Iranian censors.
“It is an underground film,” says Ghobadi, whose journalist girlfriend Roxana Saberi has just been released from jail by the Iranian authorities.

The film focuses on its two protagonists seeking to flee Iran in pursuit of artistic freedom.