Why didn't anybody tell me it would become this bad in Afghanistan- 2007, Directed by Cyrus Frisch
Shot entirely on his cell phone, Dutch film maker Cyrus Frisch presents a series of shots jumbled into the first full length feature film, shot on a cell phone camera, to premiere at a major film festival. The films only character is apparently a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who has returned to his tiny Rotterdam apartment. His balcony serves as his lone link to the outside world. He attempts to film his neighborhood and the tense cityscape below. Frisch briefly turns his eye towards the unemployed immigrant teenagers whose day and night loitering is mixed in with with starkly violent clashes with police.
Unfortunately all potentially potent footage is bogged down in pixilated obscurity. Frisch abandons the explosive early shots and instead moves into a random collage, as our protagonist looks down at his boots and completes various mundane chores. He walks up a hillside to meet an unknown man, travels by plane to an unknown destination staring out the window the whole time. Next we are treated to extra long face shots soaking up far too much grainy camera time. The worst of it comes in a painfully long sequence (4 minutes), where our hero (I'm not kidding here) takes out the garbage.
Instead of tackling the tense cultural divide between native Dutch and Middle Eastern immigrants, Frisch instead tries to craft his film into an abstraction, yet he is consistently hemmed in by the limitations of his own technology. His feature is caught between a documentary and an avant-garde film although it has the short-comings of both. Too many shots are uninteresting to start, but even those that could have been explosive are just too grainy to stomach. At best "Why didn't somebody tell me....." will secure it's position as a well intentioned novelty.
Paulie the Hat