Day 10

Laurent Cantet's THE CLASS (the French title, Entre les murs is more suggestive), showing to a less-than-full audience on the last full day of the festival. Everyone is exhausted. The festival market has closed and lots of people are already going home. And it's Saturday, 8:30 a.m. The film, by this talented director of Human Resources, Heading South and Time Out is talky and intense. The co-screenwriter worked with real-life tacher Francois Begaudeau, who plays the teacher in the film himself and who wrote a book that inspired the film. The kids in the classroom are real-life, and the events in the film are based on real-life incidents. The school is in a tough Paris neighborhood, and as the confrontation between the students and the teacher develops, it exposes the cracks both in the system and in the ability of the teacher to cope. Despite the school system's rather sympathetic approach to dealing with problem students, the film reveals the disjunction between family and social problems and the school. The film is naturalistic and intense.

Day 12

The awards: THE CLASS won the Palme d'Or - something, given how late in the festival the film was shown - I doubt anyone really expected. It is not that it is not necessarily deserving - it's that it is not significantly better than other films in this year's Cannes Festival. This year, more than perhaps any other, it would be interesting to know what really went on in the jury deliberations, because the whole list of prizes seems like a series of compromises. LORNA'S SILENCE, the new Dardenne Brothers film, gets the Best Screenplay award - a strange choice. Benicio del Toro gets the Best Actor for CHE - also strange, because his performance is pretty inconsistent (though energetic) and it is NOT a great performance. Sandra Corveloni gets the Best Actress for LINHA DE PASSE, the Brazilian film by Walter Salles in which she plays the working class single mother of 4 boys. This IS a singularly strong performance. Nuri Bilge Ceylan gets the Best Director for THREE MONKEYS; GOMORRA, the pretty terrific Neapolitan mafia film which handles multiple plot strands with great adeptness gets the GRAND PRIX of the Jury. The omission of WALTZ WITH BASHIR, the one truly innovative film in this year's lineup is strange, too. Speculation is unavoidable: is the fact that it is a documentary in animation have something to do with Marjane Satrapi, who was on this year's Cannes jury, and who is the co-director of PERSEPOLIS?

Day 8

Rave reviews here mostly for THE CHANGELING. Angelina Jolie’s career-defining performance, the nature of evil and corruption and determined struggle against evil and so on. It’s rather mind-boggling, but no less so than the French film critics who largely trash Kornel Mundruczo’s DELTA. Mundruczo, kind of a protégé of Bela Tarr, made this classically-structured, beautifully shot and poetic film about the love between a brother and sister on the waterways of the Danube. There are the Bela Tarr faces of Hungarian peasants, but Mundruczo is at once more lyrical and even romantic. The main actor of DELTA died when the film was already 75% complete, and Mundruczo had to start all over.

The hot ticket here last night was the premiere of CHE, the two-part epic about Che Guevara by Steven Soderbergh, which the Cannes festival decided to play at one 4 ½ hour sitting. It’s a strange film. Soderbergh with Che and the small band of revolutionaries leaving Mexico for Cuba and follows their armed struggle against Battista and the American-backed government by filling the film with much detail. He intercuts this narrative with several other strands – Che’s speech to United Nations in New York and an interview with Che – both of these shot in black and white in contrast to the main color narrative. This is filled with much detail about military strategy and political rhapsodizing about the structure of the future Cuban society. For all of its length and action, the film is strangely under-dramatized, and you don’t know that much more about Che coming out of the film than going into it.. CHE is rather kind of a narrative of the Cuban revolution, but even here it is strangely uninvolving, perhaps because Soderbergh wanted to keep distance and maintain some sort of “objectivity”. How and where this film will travel is hard to imagine; there will undoubtedly be some Alka-Seltzer moments for the distributor.

A wonderfully exciting surprise here last night was the premiere of a first feature by a very young Argentinian filmmaker (he is all of 31), SALAMANDRA. Set in a “lost valley” in Patagonia, a hangout for renegades and hippies from all over the world, the film is as ambitious as it is original. Alba, a thirty-year old mother gets out of prison following the end of the dictatorship, and comes to get her six-year old son, Inti. Together they make the long (1200+ kilometer) journey, hitchhiking their way to El Bolson. Here is a world of constant parties amid squalor, animals and bugs, children who attack the houses of newcomers amid which the kind of crazy Alba and her precocious son (among the most astonishing child-actor performances of all time) try to build a new life. The film doesn’t miss a note, and the frequently hand-held camera, never obvious or intrusive, gives the film an immediacy and psychological currency. I’d go see this film again if it were playing somewhere right now .

Day 7

Kornel Mundruczo’s DELTA. Mundruczo started as a kind of protégé of Bela Tarr and this is his first film in the Cannes competition – a tragic, brother-and-sister love story, beautifully and poetically shot in the Danube Delta. A very troubled production, the lead actor died when the shooting was almost finished, and since he was in every scene, the film had to be shot again from scratch. A classic structure, lots of the Hungarian peasant faces we know from Bela Tarr’s films, a lyrical touch.

Also, much awaited, the new film by Lucretia Martel (Holy Girl), THE HEADLESS WOMAN. No one does what Martel does so well – a kind of oblique narrative, with lots of characters coming in and out, bits and pieces of dialogue, the stuff of everyday life – picking up pots, children, lovers, husbands, and in the middle of it the main protagonist who is convinced she hit something (a dog, someone?) while driving.

The Clint Eastwood film, first called CHANGELING, now THE EXCHANGE – period drama set in 1920s Los Angeles, based on the kidnapping of a 9-year old boy from a single mother (Angelina Jolie) and her struggle to get the corrupt LAPD to investigate. A melodramatic script with Angelina Jolie pouting her lips at every opportunity – the narrative careens all over the place, and if nothing else, the film reveals the limitations of Jolie’s acting range.

Day 5

A diet of 5-6 films a day doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Though the speculation about possible Palme d’Or winners hasn’t really begun yet, no one is complaining about the selection of films in the competition, though opinion veers all over the place on the strongest films. Arnaud Desplechin, one of the chief progenitors of the very talky French cinema (La Sentinelle, Esther Kahn) had his feature, A Christmas Tale in competition. The ambitious (and long) film is set in the family home of a family-at-war during a Christmas holiday. Catherine Deneuve is looking for a compatible blood donor for her rare leukemia, with her estranged son Henri and psychologically-damaged grandson. Though the interlocking stories are in and of themselves banal, what is tremendously sophisticated here is Desplechin’s overlapping style, and the rigor which Desplechin applies as an overarching mirror to the subject.

Also well received here is LINHA DE PASSE, a new Brazilian film by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas. Set in a poor section of Sao Paolo, this film of the aspirations and difficult life of a single mother with her four sons harks back to neo-realistic roots, and depicts rich characters whose hopes and aspirations are thwarted by the limitations and barriers imposed by society.

A surreal scene, which can only happen at Cannes: walking out of a screening of Raymond Depardon’s beautiful, moving – and very simple – documentary portrait of French peasant farmers – MODERN LIFE. The film is full of dignity and empathy for its characters, connected to the land and the seasons and to the animals they keep. The scene on the outside of the Palais was the world premiere of the new Indiana Jones film. Huge crowds everywhere, many of those waiting for a glimpse of the stars, Harrison Ford and whomever else, now turned into objects of merchandising by wearing faux Indiana Jones hats, cleverly passed out by the studio. A special public-private moment: the audience turned into a branding mechanism – a diabolical trick of capitalism at its extreme margins.

Chaz Ebert told me this morning that Mike Phillips, the film critic of the Chicago Tribune, who gave the new Indiana Jones a mixed-bad review, was deluged within an hour here by emails from angry readers (the review wa s first posted online) – more proof that the supposedly “critic-proof” Indiana Jones franchise can triumph no matter what. There was an opinion piece in the local daily Variety here in Cannes, basically celebrating the studio’s ebullience at having critics so marginalized that, like processed fast-food, the taste and what others think of it makes little difference.

Day 1

Madness at the first press screening – Fernando Mireilles’ BLINDNESS.

It’s based on the novel by Portuguese Nobel prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago, and was shot by Mireilles (City of God, Constant Gardener) in Canada. Julianne Moore is left with sight as she accompanies her blind husband to a former mental institution where victims of a “white blindness” epidemic are herded and sent by the government. Mireilles might have a talent for visual flair, but it’s not enough to pull off this top-heavy philosophical allegory of society’s descent into cruelty and evil. Exactly two people applauded at the end of the press screening in a theatre seating 1,500. The film is short on character motivation, tries to remain faithful to the spirit of the novel with narration that veers to philosophical statements that come off as ponderous and pompous. Gabriel Garcia Bernal plays the bad guy, but a bad guy without motivation is little more than caricature. Pretentious trans-national , empty dud .

Moore, looking very striking here at the press conference with Bernal.

But a very, very exciting film here last night, WALTS WITH BASHIR- directed by Ari Folman. Feature length aninmation, the film features the filmmaker as a central character, trying to deal with his recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Gradually, by visiting a psychiatrist friend and other former army buddies, he peels back the layers of repressed memory which deal with his army service in Lebanon twenty years ago, and leads, ultimately, to the massacre of civilians at the Shattila camp. A film which resonates to the true, real experience of every soldier and to the current experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, WALTZ WITH BASHIR is brilliant (and fast-paced) because the abstraction of the theme through animation allows Folman to compress events. The film feels very personal and almost intimate – the first real winner here, in Cannes.

Day 0

The incongruous in Cannes: an open truck, stuffed with palm trees going down a narrow street. Even in the land of palm trees, the Festival needs more.

Headline in Nice Matin: the Festival means 173 million euros to the local economy.

For those who associate the Festival with fun, here, from the official catalog, are the first lines from descriptions of films in the official competition: "A city is ravaged by an epidemic of instant white blindness". Those first afflicted are quarantined by the authorities in an abandoned mental hospital." (the opening film, Blindness) "Julia wakes up in her apartment, surrounded by the bloody bodies of Ramiro and Nahuel." (Leonera by Pablo Trapero) "A family dislocated when small failings blow up into extravagant lies battles against the odds to stay together by covering up the truth." (Three Monkeys by Nuri Bilge Ceylan) "Abel and Junon had two children, Joseph and Elizabeth. Victim of a rare genetic condition, Joseph's only hope was a bone marrow transplant." ( A Christmas Tale by Arnaud Desplechin) "One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs." (Waltz with Bakshir by Ari Folman) "Chengdu nowadays. The state owned factory 420 shuts down to give way to a complex of luxury apartments.." (24 City by Jia Zhangke) "Sao Paolo. 20 million inhabitants, 200 kilometres of traffic, 300,000

messengers on bicycles." (Linha de Passe by Walter Salles) ALL of this pales, of course, to the problems one might encounter in Hollywood. The closing night film is What Just Happened?, directed by Barry Levinson. The plot description in the catalog goes like this: "The tale of a fading movie producer trying to revitalize his career while dealing with a teenage daughter who's growing up too fast, a variety of ex-wives, and several Hollywood personalities who seem to want nothing more than to make his life difficult."

CannesBlog2008-1

My 20th year of going to the Cannes Film Festival. This doesn't mean much, of course. There are people who have been coming for much longer, though the ranks of those who remember the 1960s (the grand old days when the press was taken out on picnics or boat rides to the Mediterranean islands off Cannes - a practice obviously discontinued more than 20 years ago) are now very thin.

O'Hare airport, and airline personnel are unintentionally becoming like French bureaucrats. The first reponse: "c'est impossible." When I ask to change my seat, the plane is full (not true) and the basic first response means: "Get out of my face and go away." In ten minutes, ask another agent, and of course it is all possible.

Everyone I've talked to says that this will not be a great Cannes. Perhaps they are right, but how do they know? Something has changed at the Cannes Festival during 20 years: the gulf between the true lovers and connoisseurs (this is a positive term, not a derogatory one) is wider with each year. The circus surrounding the arrival and departure of stars gets ever-more maddening and obscures the fact that a serious, artistic cinema is what is really at the core of the Cannes Festival.

Cannes is more and more of a market. That is, in itself, a good thing. Films need to be sold so that they can go into distribution and be seen elsewhere.

The producers need to find ways of recouping the cost of production from ticket and television sales, from DVDs and perhaps from downloads to someone's cell phone. But this is no longer a viable formula. In fact without the subsidies of multiple government-sponsored agencies, most art films in Europe (and elsewhere) would never be made.

I once had a very animated discussion (close to an argument) in Buenos Aires, I think, with two women each of whom headed one of these "filmmaker funds" which awards grants or production assistance to filmmakers, and Philippe Bober, the very talented producer with commitment and vision to very intelligent filmmakers (among the filmmakers he works with are Ulrich Seidl, Roy Andersson and Cristi Piuliu). The argument focused on the "pitches" that filmmakers are asked to present at various festivals or markets to "sell" their films to prospective producers. This is of course an American construct - pitching some studio head with one-liners like "a feminist Indiana Jones" or "Sex and the City in rural Iowa." It's parodied in the films "The Mistress" and Altman's "The Player."

The problem, we argued (we being myself and Philippe Bober), is that most interesting, even great films, can't be reduced to this kind of formula. A talented young filmmaker is not necessarily a great pitchman or salesman.

Introspective artistic abilities - creating sensitive, complex characters - does not fit into 10 minute sales presentations, no matter what "training"

of future filmmakers in this pitching game is offered. We ended up by discussing Lisandro Alonso, the very talented Argentinian filmmaker of "Los Muertos", whose films are slow, minimalist, with very little plot (or sometimes dialogue) - and ultimately beautiful and profound. You can't reduce them to a formula. Ultimately, to find a filmmaker like Alonso, you have to have trust in his ability, buttressed by what you know of his previous work.

This divide of films which can be packaged and merchandised (and the whole agent game which brings actors as "properties" to the project) and those which can't is a wider and wider wall of separation at Cannes.

For me, the possibility that art films can continue to exist largely depends on committed or knowledgeable people, the "enablers" of art cinema. They are not many, and perhaps not all well known. Perhaps they are producers, like Bober (and he is a young guy). Or they are like Pierre Rissient, a kind of festival advisor, promoter, godfather. Eric Khoo, the Malaysian filmmaker of "Be With Me" whom Rissient brought to the West (a wonderful, extraordinarily moving film) is one. His second film is playing at Cannes this year. Carlos Reygadas, for me the most interesting Mexican filmmaker and one of the most exciting filmmakers anywhere, started out at Cannes with Japon. Last year, his beautiful Silent Light, his third feature, set among the Mennonite community of Mexico, won a prize at Cannes. Each of his three features (Battle of Heaven was the second film, also shown at Cannes) is different in style, which makes him difficult to pigeon-hole and sometimes confounds his critics. Lucretia Martel, whose claustrophobic first feature La Cienaga I also saw at Cannes is back this year with her third feature, The Headless Woman. In her first two films (Holy Girl was the second feature), Martel found a whole new narrative language, a new way of oblique storytelling, at once perverse, terrifying and mysterious. Both Reygadas and Martel exist and work because they can piece together co-productions between producers in their own countries and European entities - Arte, the French-German arts public television channel being a principal participant.

What all this is about, ultimately, is belief in the artist. That's what the Cannes Festival is about, more than anything else, and that's what, for me, makes it interesting, enervating, exhausting, and occasionally joyous. It's not the world premiere of the new Steven Spielberg Indiana Jones.

Day -1

More on the "cinema enablers": I think of the 70s when the new German cinema became known in the U.S. largely through the efforts of Tom Luddy at the Pacific Film Archive and the visionary distributor and New York theatre-owner Dan Talbot. Tony Rayns was among the first to write about and promote Asian cinema at a time when much of what anyone knew could be condensed into one name: "Kurosawa." There were and are dozens of other people, perhaps more specialized - Jean-Louis Manceau, who specialized and promoted Central European (Czech, Polish) cinema in France, the great British distributor Andi Engel of Artificial Eye, Ingrid-Scheib Rothbart, who worked at the Goethe Institute in New York and brought so much German cinema to the U.S. or Tom Bernard and Michael Barker at Sony Classics - certainly the one and only studio-owned art film division which has stayed the course. Some, like Andi Engel, have passed on. Others are still around.

But they operate in a world which is starkly different from the success (= boxoffice gross or perceived boxoffice gross) and celebrity culture which runs rampant through press, festivals, culture and society. How much more can anyone possibly want to know about Angelina Jolie or Drew Barrymore? It is not that this celebrity culture is something new. What is different is that it is shutting out the voice of serious cinema.

What differentiates all of the "enablers" is the elusive quality of having taste, and being willing to risk and commit time and often money to sharing the films which they feel passionate about with the rest of the world.

-- Cannes is full of trucks, building the mini-city of tents, signs, directions, carpeting, fences, barriers. A worker on a crane this morning in front of the Palais (the main congress hall where most of the official screenings are held), grinding away concrete because the enormous black plastic sign with which the face of the Palais was covered (Festival de Film, 2008) would not stick or hold at the bottom edge. The rest of those who arrive early are doing the new French thing: shop. Rue d'Antibes, a long winding street which used to be the main chic shopping street has now been replaced with most of the designer stores opening their own stores (Dior, Cartier, Vuitton, Hermes, etc. - think upper Madison Avenue) on the Croisette, the street which faces the walkway along the Mediterranean. This is not shopping for the faint of heart or without an oil well in their back yard, particularly for those who come to Europe with dollars in their pockets - now virtually a third-world currency. A cotton polo shirt in the Hermes window was the equivalent of almost 1100 U.S. dollars.

May 15

France is a land of contradictions: the most charming, helpful, warm people co-exist with a certain kind of logical illogic which one can only describe as “French” – which can turn the most minor experience into a horrific one.

Charles de Gaulle airport belongs in this latter category of the absurd. For a “modern” airport, it is most idiotically spread out. When you arrive from the U.S., the plane always parks on the tarmac, which means a bus that meanders its way around to Terminal “2C” (I have never discovered whether there actually is a terminal “1”, “3” or any other number). You have not arrived, because this is merely the transfer point to another bus which then wanders slowly all the way around the airport until, 45 minutes later, we finally reach terminal “2F”. The first obstacle is security. There is now only 20 minutes to spare to catch the plane to Nice – I had 1 ½ hours as the window originally. I know I’ll never make it, so I ask an airport employee if I can somehow jump to the head of the line. He tells me to ask the police. I approach two police officers sitting in their booths facing in the opposite direction, show them my boarding pass and ask if I can somehow get through faster. The younger officer smiles and says, no, it’s the end of the line, but there are more planes all day, no problem.

The long queue is for the non-European union citizens, but the separate line for members of the European Union is almost empty. I pretend to be an EU member, go through that line, apologize to the young officer. He stamps the passport and whisks me through. But hell has multiple rings. Now there is the line to screen baggage. Backup here too. The airport guy monitoring this line has more presence of mind, and points me in another direction to go around. I turn left and find another screening entry point where a young woman looks at my ticket and urges me to hurry, sending me to the fastest baggage line.

Once boarded on the Air France plane, I discover someone is sitting in my seat. I point this out to a flight attendant and hand her my boarding pass.

She puts it in her pocket, and walks around the plane. I assume she is waiting for the plane to get full so she can re-organize the seats. But I am wrong. When the plane is finally full and I am still standing (now looking like an idiot) in the aisle, I ask her again. “Oh, “ she says, “there was some problem and we solved it. But you can sit here, pointing to 16A – a row in front of the 17A where I was supposed to sit.” Approaching Nice airport is often quite beautiful. You fly over the Alps, the hills of Provence, and suddenly there is the Mediterranean, and the plane banks left to land, since the airport borders the sea.

As the passengers are disembarking, my name is called over the intercom and I am asked to see the ground staff. The Air France woman tells me that my baggage is not on this flight, and I should go to the Air France baggage office and file a claim. I am told that it will be on the next flight, arriving at 3, and I can call around 4 to find out when it will be delivered in Cannes. Remembering my previous experience from 2 years ago when Air France also delayed my baggage (this has happened 4 times in the last 5

years on various flights to Charles de Gaulle airport on Air France) I ask, “Does someone answer the phone number that you are giving me. “ “Oh yes,” she says, “someone is there all the time.” But this is not my experience the last time it happened, I tell her. She admits that in the past, when the phone calls came to them directly, if they were busy, yes, they would not answer the phone. It’s logical.

The someone else at the end of the phone line at 4:3p p.m. is Andrew. He insists on my giving him all of the information which he already has in the computer all over again, and gets flustered when I don’t have the Cannes city zip code. They could not have told me 4 o’clock, he says, because it takes 2 1./2 to 3 hours to get the bag off the plane, identify it, pick it up, X-ray it and send it through customs he says. But call back around 6.

I receive a cryptic message on my cell phone around 6, telling me that the bag has been “received,” and nothing more. Jennifer, who is on the other end of the phone line instead of Andrew at 6:30 p.m. can’t explain what the message means. Are they actually delivering the bag? She can’t tell, because the “system is down.” “Well, how can we find out? Can we call the baggage office at Nice airport?” She is horrified. “Oh no, they can’t tell anything either because they would be looking at the same computer.” “O.K. I said, but if they tell the driver where to deliver it, they must have given him a printed piece of paper – I will call, I volunteer. Can you give me the number?” She is horrified once more. “This is an international office,” she responds.

“We don’t have any other phone numbers.” It is now 8 p.m. I tried to look up the Air France baggage office phone number is not in the Nice phone book. But I see the phone number for the general office of the airport. The woman at the airport office is just wonderful, all smiles. I have the number for the Air France switchboard, she says, but I will look for the number of the Air France baggage office. (I have the number. If you are traveling to Nice via Air France, contact me and I will share it with you). The problem is this: the number rings 30 times and no answer.

A half hour later, there is a miracle – the kind of thing which happens in France infrequently, but truly gives you hope. (Once, standing in a line at the Post Office, the clerk closed the window in my stunned face when I was next in line. Then, miracle! She re-opened it, looked at me, and motioned me to come ahead and get served).

Someone answers at the Air France Nice baggage office. She tells me that the computer is down. But she finds the paper (computers have NOT de-papered France) and says “but we tried to call you at 4:30.” “Yes, but you left a message, nothing else, and no phone number to call back.” “But there is never a number to call back. If you don’t answer the phone, we don’t deliver,” she says, “We will call you again at 9:30.” I am waiting, But here is that logic, shining in neon, awesome in its brilliance. The fact that you didn’t answer the phone logically destroys any other question or issue. It doesn’t matter that we didn’t leave a call back number, because we never leave a call back number – that’s a given principle. That’s how it is.

Because you didn’t answer we won’t try to deliver. And as for any extra effort because it is our fault that your baggage is missing in the first place (or that you might actually need things that are in the baggage or that you are being further inconvenienced by having to trace it) this, too, doesn’t matter, because we called to try to deliver it.

The phone call did come, early, at 9:10 p.m. The bag would be delivered between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m.

- Milos Stehlik May 16, 2006

France is a country naturally created for the Da Vinci Code. For one thing, it is impossible to go anywhere or do anything here without a “code” – or, to be accurate, codes, in the plural. I am walking around with a notebook full of these codes – one for my internet access for tickets, another for the WiFi access at the Orange Café in the Palais, a third for the press code, another to access the computer inside the press room. Each of these is individual, scrambled with nonsensical sequences of letters and numbers and neither the login nor the password are changeable. It obviously must make the creators of these codes very happy.

The Festival staff whose job it is to assist with the technical problems which invariably arise from the usage of these codes is friendly, helpful, accommodating. Of course there is a long way to go before the end of the Festival.

The Da Vinci Code is all over the place here. Two big posters, both of the Mona Lisa, hang over the central stairway of the Palais. In one, the Mona Lisa is wearing a sailors cap with :”Cannes” written on the rim, in another, a pair of fashionable sunglasses. Every bookstore, grocery store and department store is flush with displays. France 2, one of the commercial TV channels, is airing a special on the Opus Dei.

No wonder the Vatican is scared – the worldwide marketing blitz is almost as good as the selling of the Iraq war to the American people. George Christensen, a longtime Facets volunteer whom I met on the street here, said he had gone to a talk by an Opus Dei priest where someone from the audience suggested that if a Catholic really desperately wants to go see the Da Vinci Code, he should buy a ticket for a different film in the multiplex so that it doesn’t go into the Da Vinci Code coffers and doesn’t count in the boxoffice tally – and then sneak into the Da Vinci Code screening. The priest, said George, would not condone the ethics but thought it was a practical idea nonetheless.

The press book for the film is what you would expect – full of the actors and director expressing love and admiration for each other, in breathless rapture over having read the book and been inspired by what grand entertainment it might make.

I found some statements by Tom Hanks to be as mystifying as the “code”.

Speaking of his co-star, Audrey Tautou, he said “Audrey is intimidating and mysterious. She’s very ethereal in some ways and yet, when she asks a question, you believe that this is a genuine inquiry.” Another, rather philosophical musing from Hanks, talking about the adaptation of the book to the film, goes like this: “You have to give every reader what they’re expecting, because, quite frankly, the book is really good. You could change it, make it different, but you’d better be sure you’re also making it better.” - Milos Stehlik May 17

The first press screening of THE DA VINCI CODE which apparently has been held back from anyone outside a few select people seeing it. The entourage for the film – all of the actors – arrive here in Cannes on a special chartered train from London.. The journalists invited on the junket can only bring pen and paper on board. Their luggage is being sent separately. A different star from the film is installed in each car. The journalists can then go from car to car and interview them.

The screening goes over badly. The film is overlong, boring, despite its incessant chase sequences and obnoxious music by Hans Zimmer. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou have no screen chemistry, and Tom Hanks’ character has nothing to hang onto. Hanks is totally unbelievable as the professor of symbology from Harvard, and I wonder if he was not even uncomfortable in the role.

The best line here was reserved in the packed press conference, and came from Ian McKellan. As all the other stars mealy-mouthed about how they really didn’t set out to create any controversy with the Catholic Church, and that everyone can take away from the film their own impressions, McKellan jumped in and said, “I’m very happy to believe that Jesus was married. I know the Catholic Church has problems with gay people and I thought this would be absolutely proof that Jesus was not gay.” Later this morning, there is the screening of the compilation film, PARIS, JE T’AIME. Twenty filmmakers – many major names – each making a short fictions segment set in a different neighborhood of Paris. Not a bad idea – what other cities are so cinematic, after all? Denis Podalydes, the inventive French director (and actor) of comedies, Ethan and Joel Coen, Gus Van Sant, Christopher Doyle, Wes Craven, Gerard Depardieu, Alexander Payne, Walter Salles, Isabel Coixet are among those who contribute segments. Almost none of them work very well. The piece by Alexander Payne, which is last in sequence, is also the most inventive. A middle-aged American woman, a postal delivery person from Denver, visiting Paris, talks about having someone to share her experiences with, all in very badly pronounced and enunciated French. It’s both understated and funny.

And the new film by Rolf de Heer – certainly Australia’s most talented filmmaker, and the one Aussie filmmaker who has continued to work in Australia, not emigrating to Hollywood. De Heer is, I think, a filmmaker who is fascinated by many different genres, and the range of the subjects of his films is, in itself, quite astonishing. QUIET ROOM, THE TRACKER, BAY BOY BUBBY, ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT seem to have nothing to do with each other.

Yet there is always a certain cutting edge of an idea, and an artistic concept. TEN CANOES is essentially an aboriginal tale. The great actor, David Gulpilil (The Tracker) narrates the story if ten men who go out into the swamp to collect eggs of the gumang, the magpie goose. Dayindi, a young warrior who covets the wife of his older brother, is told a cautionary tale from the mythical past. The story is, in itself, fantastic, but what is most fantastic is how expansive it is, how it grows, as Gulpilil narrates in the film, “like a tree.” It is an entirely different way of storytelling demanding, allegorical, lyrical, violent, moral. The film is beautiful to watch and deeply humanistic, with the narration in English and the acted sequences in the original tribal language.

- Milos Stehlik May 18

They have blocked the door to the press typing room because Almodovar is arriving with the entourage. It is something to watch. First, some advance person walking rapidly with a walkie talkie. Then a couple of guys in jackets, security, no doubt, then Christiane Aime, the director of press for the Festival. A cameraman, his camera on his shoulder, walking backwards.

Then Thierry Fremaux, the program director of the Festival walks with Almodovar in his customary tieless open shirt. Carmen Maura, who stops for a moment and poses for a picture. Then Penelope Cruz, some more technical types, another cameraman following, shooting, I assume, the entourage walking from the back. Outside, the entrance to the press conference room is cordoned off. The security guard explains, “C’est le problem de Festival.” Several rows of people are lined up alongside the ropes creating a direct passage to the press conference room. Such is the nature of celebrity. The British newspaper, The Guardian, I think, which I read yesterday, is filled with contradictory reports about the breakup of the marriage of ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife, mostly related to the settlement she will get in the divorce from the almost-billionaire McCartney. One writer takes out after McCartney and ex-wife-to-be’s proclamation about how their marriage was ruined by celebrity-hood – constantly being in the public eye. This journalist takes this at face value: whom did the future McCartney think she was marrying? It was not as if her husband-to-be was some obscure marginal figure when she met him.

Back to VOLVER: Most important, the film marks a continuing evolution for Almodovar. The bizarre personal relationships, transvestites and transsexuals, the hypocrisy of the Catholic church in Spain – these are gone or much more muted, as is the humor, and now there is a more reflective Almodovar, thinking of other things. In the case of VOLVER, it is solving the messes of human relationships. Giving away the plot of the film is giving away the film, because there are surprises, but they are told much more gently. There is humor, but it, too, is more gentle, still clever, but not biting anyone. Fortunately in this case, I don’t speak Spanish so a part of how well Penelope Cruz – at least in her English-language films a beautiful woman but a lousy actress – is lost for me. Carmen Maura plays Cruz’s mother and Lola Duenas her sister.

Emmanuel Bourdieu’s second feature, LES AMITIES MALEFIQUES, opened the Semaines de la Critique, the Critics’ Week here in Cannes. These are films, usually first or second features, chosen by the society of French film critics. Bourdieu worked as a screenwriter and also works in the theatre.

Most prominently, he wrote scripts for Arnaud Desplechin, Nicole Garcia and for Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. But this film, about the mena-spirited manipulation of friends, set in the world of literary academia (among the students at the College Rene Descartes in Paris), is full of pretentious posturing. This, explains Bourdieu in the pressbook, is apparently intentional. In his view, preserving the rigidity of the postures, the words and the air leads to reveal the fixation of the characters, and triumphs in the establishment of an order, rigid and obtuse. Obtuse it is. I was reminded while watching LES AMITIES MALEFIQUES, somewhat of the films by American expatriate Eugene Green, who has lived and worked in Paris for a long time, but whose films (Le Pont des Arts, for example) travel a similar milieu, but are redeemed by their irony and sense of humor.

- Milos Stehlik Day 5

John Cameron Mitchell’s SHORTBUS – a film in the making for over four years.

The creator of first the stage play and then the film HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH is without doubt talented. The story of the making of the film is, in its own way, as interesting as the film. He invited submissions and auditioned people all over the country with the proviso that they would be willing to have sex on screen. He “workshopped” the film collaboratively, rehearsed extensively, using the improvisations of the participants to evolve the storyline. The finished film covers intersecting stories of several couples – James and Jamie, who have been together a long time but are now looking to expand to other people outside their relationship. Sex therapist who would prefer to be called “relationship counselor” Sofia has never had an orgasm and so this is her quest. The set piece of the film is in a kind of “club” called Shortbus, where anything goes. There is lots of nudity and graphic sex, and this of course creates much notoriety for the film. But its real substance lies in Mitchell’s ability to create a kind of performance, to develop an artifice. At the end of the film you realize that the theme of it is actually pretty thin, and that it doesn’t have much to say, except to be in favor of personal (and sexual) liberation.

The screening was predictably packed, but strangely there was no buzz afterward. You heard no one talking about the film.

A major disappointment: CLIMATES, the new film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Turkish director of the wonderful film, DISTANT. The lead characters are played by Ceylan as Isa, a teacher of archeology at a university. Isa’s wife Bahar, an art director for TV, is played by Ceylan’s own second wife, Ebru Ceylan. At the beginning of the film they are on vacation, as their relationship falls apart. They go back to Istanbul separately and begin to live separate lives. Isa takes up with an ex-girlfriend Serap, then has a change of heart and goes to eastern Turkey where Bahar is now working on a new TV series. He asks her to take him back, quit her job and come back to Istanbul with him. He is a guy who can’t get anything right in relationships. But all of this is not only transparent but kind of cloyingly self-indulgent because none of the characters are particularly interesting.

We leave the film not caring whether they get together or not. Ceylan says in the press book that “Isa and Bahar are two lonely figures dragged through the ever-changing climate of their inner selves in pursuit of a happiness that no longer belongs to them.” But even this statement is generic – they are empty people, but the film is empty, too. Antonioni knew a lot can be said about empty lives and empty people. In CLIMATES, it’s obvious that Ceylan is no Antonioni.

Protests here: 20 Korean filmmakers assembled in front of the Palais last night, chanting. The quota for foreign films in Korea, which was used to finance and create a niche for the Korean film industry, is being eliminated under pressure from American film studios. No protest, but an email chain that people are talking about. A new film law passed by the Parliament in the Czech Republic would create a film fund for local production which would be at least 20 times what is available now. It was vetoed by president Vaclav Klaus, supposedly under pressure from the private television channel interests who would be taxed to create this fund. There is a chance for reprieve on Tuesday when the Parliament can take up the bill again.

- Milos Stehlik Day 6

If you want to watch films at Cannes, it is difficult to juggle the incessant screenings with arranging definite times for meeting people. Most meetings are incidental – on the street, in line, at a party. Bits of information also come this way. A British journalist who just visited Jiri Menzel on the set of the great novel by Bohumil Hrabal, the subject of enormous legal wrangling over the film rights for years, I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND. The film is already scheduled to have a release in Prague on December 21.

An Iranian distributor: the uncertainty of the future of film in Iran because of the political regime. I catch up with Jafar Panahi’s OFFSIDE at a market screening. The film was received well in Berlin, where it had its premiere. Girls who try to go to see a football match disguised as boys, because women are forbidden from sports stadiums. Provocative and interesting, but a thin idea, perhaps good for a 45-minute featurette, stretched out to an hour and a half. Most films made everywhere today are far too long. No one knows how to cut. A film like yesterday’s 82 minute LIGHTS IN THE DUSK, the new feature by Ari Kaurismaki, is like a revelation – it is the right length.

More gossip: Juliette Binoche is in the new film by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. No idea where it is being shot. The screening of Bruno Dumont’s FLANDERS, by the very talented director of L’HUMANITE and LIFE OF JESUS, and the misstep of 29 PALMS. Set in his native Flanders. Sex, (never love, until the end), landscapes, mud, then the Flanders boys go to war in what we assume to be Afghanistan. Brutality, betrayal. All the elements and Dumont’s great use of non-professional actors are there, but not that much of a theme and the film seems rather disconnected, missing a tight completely worked out structure.

Same could be said for a major disappointment, Nanni Moretti’s THE CAIMAN, a surprise hit in Italy, Moretti’s first hit since his Cannes Palme d’Or winner six years ago, THE SON’S ROOM. The subject, Berlusconi, is close to Moretti’s heart, since he has been obsessed with getting Italy rid of Berlusconi for years. A failed grade Z movie producer with a life that’s falling apart, ends up with the script of a film about Berlusconi. There are moments of humor, and some inventive devices – using different actors to portray Berlusconi (in the final scene, Moretti himself stands in for Berlusconi) – for example. The final scene, in a court room, in which Berlusconi is convicted, is heartfelt and wonderful, but much of the rest of the film meanders all over the place Conversation with Monique Montgomery Luddy, who is one of the few people to have seen Sofia Coppola’s still-to-come MARIE ANTOINETTE. She is convinced that Coppola will win here in Cannes. Almodovar’s VOLVER, which is probably the favored candidate thus far, will fade away from being in the running for the competition once people get to see Coppola’s film. Whereas VOLVER is not really anything new, the jury and the public will embrace the freshness and originality of MARIE ANTOINETTE.

- Milos Stehlik DAY 7

MARIE ANTOINETTE screening at 8:30 in the morning. The theatre is packed.

The film follows Marie Antoinette from the moment she leaves Austria to be married to the French dauphin to the moment the angry mob forces them to leave Versailles to what will know will be their execution.

Elaborate costumes and the incredible décor of Versailles. Kirsten Dunst is Marie Antoinette. She has a frozen smile on her face in one expression that lasts through the entire film. Period music alternates with rock ‘n roll.

The dialogue is written in American idiom. Very difficult to figure out what anyone was thinking. Just because Marie Antoinette says “yeah” is not likely to get American teenagers to flock to the film.

An article here in some newspaper this morning about how the film MARIE ANTOINETTE is going to spur a new direction in fashion.

At the end of the screening, a modest applause from the balcony. The press, much of whom sit on the first floor at the 8:30 a.m. screenings, sit in stunned silence, then, almost as a delayed reaction, not wanting to let the cheers go on without a response, a chorus of boos from the ground floor.

Sofia, Kirsten Dunst, the “team” of MARIE ANTOINETTE face an army of photographers, their telephoto lenses pointed, at the photo call. Then the entourage, flanked by security guards, with Francis Ford Coppola bringing up the rear, move from the roof of the Palais to the press conference.

- Milos Stehlik

24th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, October 7-16, 2005

By Virginia Wright Wexman In recent years, cinema scholars have become fascinated with the way in which film emerged just at the moment when society was moving into the modern era, during a period at the turn of the twentieth century dominated by technological innovation and capitalist expansion. The Pordenone Festival of early cinema, held for the past 24 years in northeastern Italy, has played no small role in the burgeoning interest in this period has attracted. The 2005 edition of the festival was particularly rich in movies that illustrated the anxiety about modernity that was typical of the era in which they were made, enabling those of us in attendance to gain a deeper understanding of the novel perspectives on the world and its changing aspect that presented themselves to people a century ago.

Japanese cinema was especially sensitive to the new opportunities that the modern era opened up for women and the new vulnerabilities that accompanied them. The Festival’s program of early Japanese films included a generous selection of so-called “tendency films,” that treated contemporary problems—often problems concerning women caught in a modern world where traditional family life has deteriorated. Many of the plots of these films center on women who are forced to work in demeaning jobs to support themselves and their men. Kenji Mizoguchi’s Osen of the Paper Cranes (JA 1935) and Yazijiro Ozu’s Woman of Tokyo (JA, 1933) are two examples of this pattern, as are three of the four films of Mikio Naruse that were shown: Farewell to You (JA, 1933), Every Night’s Dream (JA, 1933), and Street Without End (JA, 1934). The sense of entrapment generated in all of these tales is heightened by the typically flattened out mise-en-scène of Japanese films, in which characters appear to be hemmed in by screens and doorways—an effect strikingly on display in the beautifully restored prints the Japanese Film Center brought to Pordenone. The standout among these outstanding productions is Every Night’s Dream, in which a married woman with a ne’er do well husband is forced into prostitution to feed herself and her son. The story is melodramatic, but the telling is restrained, a virtue characteristic of its director’s approach. With four powerful films on display, Naruse, whose centenary was celebrated as part of the Pordenone festival, emerged as a worthy addition to Japan’s pantheon of movie greats, joining the triumvirate of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa.

Women’s altered roles grew out of the shift to a more urbanized social environment. The group of French films we saw at Pordenone suggested that this change, too, was met with some apprehension. The stage-trained director André Antoine and his circle turned their backs on life in the modern city with a series of productions based on well-known literary works. Some of those we saw at Pordenone were historical dramas; others featured pastoral recreations of country life shot “en plein air” in the provinces, these included Le Chemineau (Henry Krauss, FR, 1917) La Terre (Antoine, FR, 1919-21), La Hirondelle et la Mésange (Antoine, FR, 1920), L’Arlésienne (Antoine, FR, 1922), and La Brière (Leon Poirier, FR 1925),. All of these latter films conveyed an ineffable sense of nostalgia for a vanishing agrarian landscape that modernity was relegating to the margins. Perhaps the most telling moments in these realist studies of peasant life occurred in La Hirondelle et la Mésange, when the camera, set up on a barge, lingers over long traveling shots of the passing countryside as it passes from view.

If nostalgia for a pre-modern way of life haunted the French films on the Pordenone program, a less imaginative form of resistance to modernity was on display in some of the bloated blockbusters we saw from the same era, which stubbornly reproduced the hoary conventions of Nineteenth Century stage melodrama. The newly restored Beyond the Rocks (Sam Wood, US, 1922), featured two of the biggest stars of the day, Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson, both egregiously overdressed, in a far-fetched tale of rich people with noble hearts and raging passions. Ernst Lubitsch’s early success Das Weib des Pharaoh/ The Loves of Pharaoh (GE, 1922), was no better; a ponderous costume drama, it made one rejoice that the director was soon to discover his flair for light comedy.

The Pordenone Festival itself can be said to be resisting modernity as well, but in a more engaging manner. Set as it has been since 1999 in the small town of Sacile, with its peaceful canals and Renaissance piazzas, the experience of the Giornate, as it is called in Italian, takes one back to an earlier epoch. For the past few years, the organizers have been promising to move the screenings to a newly constructed theater in the city of Pordenone, where the Festival first began in 1983. But until this happens, many of us will savor the time-warp that lets us forget that we live in a post-modern world as we discover lost treasures from the beginning of the Twentieth Century in a setting that evokes the Fifteenth.

The Pusan International Film Festival, October 8 and 9

By Alissa Simon The Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), self-proclaimed "the world's most energetic" is only two Korean Air flights away from Chicago. Okay, make that a 13.5 hour flight, a three hour layover at ultra-modern Incheon airport, and another hour to Korea's bustling southern port city. When I arrived on the 8th, I felt more enervated than energetic, but my posh beachside billeting at the Hae-undae Grand Hotel (with the most comfortable bed I have ever slept on) worked some overnight magic. By Saturday morning I was ready to be taken to PIFF's vaunted "next level and beyond."

Festival headquarters for the ninth edition of PIFF are in Hae-undae (which means sea-cloud-hill) for the first time. Screenings unreel nearby at the 10-screen multiplex Megabox which is housed on the 6th floor of mall called Sfunz Center. The former headquarters, Nampo-dong, still operates 4

screens, but depending on the considerable traffic, it could take up to 2

hours to travel between the two locations. Fest veterans say they liked the gritty old port atmosphere of Nampo-dong, but who can argue with beachside and a sunny 75 degrees.

Due to the large slowmoving crowds at the Sfunz Center (ticket line ups, determined shoppers, star gazers,and bewildered festival guests) it is necessary to save at least 8 minutes to commute by escalator from the street to the top. Timeliness is a real issue this year as the Festival has decided not to admit latecomers. Apparently they polled guests and audiences each year and the majority preferred the "be on time or else."

Since I have been safely inside the theaters, I haven't actually seen this policy enforced, but it works in favor of people like me who don't want to sit in pre-assigned seats and prefer to nab empty aisles.

As I started my escalator commute, I sighted Sibel Kekelli, the petite and ethereal star of Fatih Akin's Berlin-prize winner HEAD ON. Sibel, who also won the Berlin Best Actress Prize, had come for an open air screening of her film, in spite of her fear of flying. Clad in jeans and high-heeled boots she sat on a bench next to a German companion, tapping her toes in time to the noisy mall music.

If her bench had faced the other direction, Sibel would have seen the vision that was making teen girls scream -- a beautiful young woman in a plaid and pleated skirt was wandering along the aisle, made up to look like a ghost.

It was distinctly unnerving sight: whitefaced and bloody mouthed, you would not want to meet her on some deserted stretch of beach.

Alissa Simon at the Montreal World Film Festival: August 31, 2004

Rode in from the airport with Wendy Mitchell of Indiewire. She’s covering the Montreal World Film Festival (MWFF) for the first time ("I stole it from Brandon Judell," she said.) It’s also her first festival as an Indiewire freelancer. Unfortunately, the popular web publication is having financial problems.

She noted that these are exacerbated by the cancellation of the IFCRant for which Indiewire provided most of the editorial content.

Decided to establish a standard of comparison by beginning my viewing with a repeat screening of my favorite film of the year so far, Fatih Akin’s Berlin Golden Bear winner HEAD-ON. Discussing my passion for this film and the two lead performances (actress Sibel Kekilli, a newcomer, took Berlin’s Best Actress prize too) with some colleagues. An eminent critic inquired if we had heard about the scandal. Apparently, this fresh-faced 23-year-old performer, a government administrator, whose discovery in a Cologne shopping mall had been touted in all the papers, was also an experienced porno actress. Just "googled"

Sibel, and she did star in a string of pornographic films. Well, that would explain her ease with the camera in HEAD-ON’s numerous sex scenes.

Had drinks with Danny Verete, Israeli writer-director of METALLIC BLUES, a prize-winner at the recent Jerusalem Festival which will make its international premiere in Montreal (the film is partially funded by Quebec money) later this week. Despite the 24-hour trip from Tel Aviv, he was feeling very up over advance reviews that begin, "if there is one film NOT to miss at the MWFF."

The 54th Annual Berlin International Film Festival: February 5-15, 2004
by Phil Morehart
I knew we were all going to die when Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” segued into Led Zeppelin’s infamous ode to the afterlife on my flimsy airline headphones during take off. What a way to go – a death pulled straight from the dusty urban legends file.
I could hear it now: “…and when they found Phil’s body in the twisted plane wreckage, “Stairway to Heaven” was still playing through the headphones burned into his skull.”
I was a bit edgy during my flight to Berlin for the 54th Annual Berlinale. This was the real deal: my first job covering an international film festival and, subsequently, my first overseas flight.

I was sweating. Needing to clear my head, I chose the obvious methods available – a Heineken and the in-flight film, Russell Crowe’s over-hyped, sea-battle extravaganza, Master and Commander. I let the maritime nonsense suck me in, numbing the anxieties borne from being thrown across the Atlantic strapped into a large metal tube.
After a quick layover in Amsterdam, I found myself in Berlin eager to hit a press conference for the festival’s opening film, the Civil War behemoth Cold Mountain. Unfortunately, my jetlagged body had different plans when it saw the cloud that passed for a bed in my quaint hotel room. I passed out, hard, awakening hours later. Press conference over, I cursed myself and the inventors of the time zone for making me miss a face-to-face encounter with Cold Mountain star Nicole Kidman (who coincidentally was a no-show, much to the disappointment of Berlinale president Dieter Kosslick).
Foregoing food for glamour, I raced to the Postsdamer Platz for the opening night festivities. An impressive example of architectural renovation, the once desolate wasteland that surrounded a portion of the Berlin Wall has grown into a lively and modern complex of movie theatres, museums, restaurants and bars that harkens back to the area’s pre-war days as a hub of Berlin life. The centerpiece of the new Postsdamer Platz is the Berlinale Palast, a marvelous theater whose facade rivaled the glitterati lined up along its red carpet for the opening film.
The power of celebrity was alive at the Palast, with the hordes of fans and flashes of cameras elevating the festivities to a surreal level. Settling at the red carpet’s right-hand side below a mega-screen television broadcasting images of Claudia Schiffer, Faye Dunaway, Anthony Minghella and Philip Seymour Hoffman entering the theater, I had a perfect view of the landscape and its energy. The moment soon boiled into insanity, though, as a large group of enterprising students protesting university funding cuts rushed the Palast, only to be met by an equal number of Berlin police.
Screams of protest now competed with screams of adoration and I was in the center. The chaos, combined with the lingering jet lag and an awful rot gut from airline food, revived my temporarily repressed trepidation and I pictured myself at the bottom of a German stampede.

It was time to leave.
Day two began at 8:30am, shoulder-to-shoulder with hundreds of journalists waiting to enter a press screening. I wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of bodies, but I was surprised at how cordial and polite everyone was considering the sardine conditions.
A common curiosity and eagerness to discover more about the person seated next to you replaced the rude crowds I was accustomed to at sold-out American theaters. It was a refreshing change of pace.

Regardless of minor language barriers, writers and filmmakers from around the world took advantage of the tight quarters to meet and talk film.


Speaking with an older German writer about Jack Nicholson, who was at the festival promoting Something’s Gotta Give, I was struck by her pleasant surprise when I mentioned that I had seen, and liked, About Schmidt. I took for granted the fact that the film, which played every multiplex across America, was a foreign gem to her, much like many of her favorite German films probably are to me.
A videographer from Brazil relayed a humorous story about his first encounter with the young Iranian filmmaker with whom he was sharing a hotel room for the week. Upon meeting his roomie’s female friends, the Brazilian greeted them each with a kiss on the cheek. His friendly gesture was not customary to the Iranian girls and he was shocked by their collective horror. After quick explanations and kind apologies, the misunderstanding transformed into laughter and the group went out to enjoy the festival.
These interactions were as interesting as the screenings themselves and reaffirmed film and the film festival’s importance as a means of cultural interaction and understanding.
A four-day stay at the Berlinale does not come close to providing enough time to see everything. Sticking to the morning Competition Program schedule, I found five films addressing both the frailty and power of the human condition.
Swedish director Bjorn Runge’s excellent interweaving family drama, Daybreak (Om Jag Vänder Mig Om), charts the traumatic and revelatory layers of deceit that unfold within three families during the course of one evening. Devastatingly emotional at times, Daybreak also possesses a dark humor that sits comfortably among the uncomfortable situations that arise from lies, adultery, pain and fear. It’s no surprise that the film earned the Blue Angel Award for the best European film and that the ensemble cast earned the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
Adapted from the novel Alabaster Sheep by Jurica Pavicic, Croatian director Vinko Bresan’s Witnesses (Svjedoci) is a compelling crime drama told against the backdrop of the Serbian-Croatian conflict. Three Croatian soldiers murder their Serbian neighbor and take the lone witness - the man’s young daughter - hostage. The detective investigating the case faces opposition from the townsfolk as he digs deeper into the case. Jumping backward and forward in time to reveal the differing perspectives of each party involved, Witnesses keeps its audience guessing. As the details are revealed, the conflicted emotions of each character compound to a breaking point and a surprising conclusion.
Hans Peter Moland’s Beautiful Country was a personal favorite.

The film follows a young Vietnamese-American man named Binh (Damien Nguyen, in an impressive debut) as he leaves his terrible home life in Vietnam behind to find his American G.I. father in Texas. The harrowing, epic journey takes him around the world on refugee ships and introduces him to emotions and horrors that he had never before known. Undeterred, Binh continues his quest in the face of unbelievable odds. Fine performances from Nguyen, Tim Roth as the sympathetic, yet vicious ship captain, Bai Ling as the fellow refugee who captures Binh's heart, and Nick Nolte as Binh’s blind American father save the film from overwrought sentimentality, but the true hero is Stuart Dryburgh’s cinematography. Dryburgh gives each locale a beautifully distinct color, from the hazy, rain soaked backwaters of Vietnam, to the bleak, claustrophobic conditions in the refugee camps and ships, to the stark grays of New York City, to the orange glow of mid-Texas.
The most anticipated Competition entry for me was In Your Hands (Forbrydelser), the second film from Danish director Annette K. Olesen (Minor Mishaps). One of the last films to be given the Dogme stamp of approval, it uses the minimalist movement’s insistence on realism and naturalism to great effect to tell the stories of a chaplain at a women’s prison and a prisoner who can purportedly perform miracles. The chaplain discovers that she is pregnant, but her unborn child may be born with serious birth defects. Her faith is tested as she decides between having the baby, having an abortion or seeking the aid of the prisoner. Hand-held cameras lend a quiet immediacy to the moral, theological and supernatural ground that Olesen mines and capture believable, resonant performances.
Country of My Skull, the latest film from John Boorman (Deliverance), looks at South Africa's post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, which found thousands of mostly black victims of police brutality confronting and forgiving their attackers. The film had the potential to be a powerful, indicting account of a government’s atrocities towards its people, but it was ruined by a formulaic sub-plot about two journalists, played by Samuel L. Jackson and Juliette Binoche, who find love while covering the hearings. The affair between the black American journalist (Jackson) and the stubborn Afrikaner poet (Binoche) drags the story into banality and unfortunately renders the emotional scenes at the Commission hearings ineffective. The film’s only savior is its cinematography, which rolls across South Africa’s stunning landscape with grace.
Apart from the Competition program, I ventured to three very different films that proved irresistible. The teenage horror film junkie inside of me screamed upon learning of the screening of George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead, as a part of the Retrospective series, “New Hollywood 1967

– 1976.

Trouble in Wonderland.” Fifteen years as a movie fan culminated as I watched a grainy, worn-out print of the first film that I really loved and that really scared me. It was great.
Gianni Mina’s Traveling with Che Guevara, screened as a part of the Panorama Dokumente section, looks into the past of Alberto Granado, whose infamous journey across South America in 1952 with a young, pre-revolutionary Che Guevara became the inspiration for Guevara’s book, The Motorcycle Diaries. Subsequently, the book was adapted into an eponymous film by Walter Salles, which pulled out of the Berlinale in favor of a Cannes screening. Mina’s documentary serves as both a production chronicle of Salles’s film and a travelogue, following Granado as he watches the recreation of his journey by Salles and as he revisits the major destinations of the trip. The film is full of indelible moments – the most touching being the cast’s presentation to Granado of an exact replica of the Norton 500 motorcycle that he and Che rode across the country. Without a thought, but with some help, Granado hops on the bike between actors Rodrigo de la Serna and Gael Garcia Bernal and the trio takes off.
The 81-year-old Granado traveled from his home in Cuba to attend the premiere. Speaking after the screening, joined by Mina and Che’s son, Camilo Guevara, Granado’s pride in both the film and his fascinating life was very evident and understandable even without the translator’s aide.
My final night in Berlin was spent not sightseeing or taking in one of the city’s nightspots, but in a Tiergarten concert hall experiencing Process, the new film from CS Leigh. Experiencing is an apt description. With a live musical accompaniment by Velvet Underground co-founder/avant-rock provocateur John Cale, multiple television sets and three screens of projected images, the show was a visual and auditory feast. The film itself proved as compelling as its complimentary set pieces as it examined a woman’s self-mutilation in the days leading up to her suicide. Using a series of long contemplative shots with minimal dialogue, the film voyeuristically peers at the sexual, physical and emotional tests that she puts herself through in her final days. Very graphic, brutal and challenging, it proved to be the most interesting film that I saw at the festival.
The flight back to the United States was a breeze. The festival’s films, conversations and sights played through my head over and over, invigorating me with a newfound appreciation for both cinema and the world. I will be back at the Berlinale next year.
As the plane leveled into its cruising altitude, the lights dimmed to signal the start of the final film of my journey. School of Rock was the perfect capper to the week. The well-crafted Hollywood film was a welcome departure from the serious fare at the Berlinale, reminding me of cinema’s equally important value as both a form of entertainment and escapism. I ordered a drink and let Jack Black’s power chords of hilarity take me home.

October 14 & 16
Canadian Thanksgiving differs from its American counterpart in many ways.

In
Montreal, there are no stories of pilgrims and Indians, no countdowns to
Christmas, no excuses for shopping. Accion de Grace, as the Quebeois call it,
grew out of a religious holiday expressing gratitude for the harvest.

Most
restaurants are open, but as in the U.S., attending an after-dinner film has
become popular.
Quebec choreographer and filmmaker Edouard Lock celebrated the world premiere
of a seductive new video piece, AMELIA, featuring his renowned modern dance
troupe La La La Human Steps. Filmed inside the burnished walls of an inclined
wooden box, the performers make precise and beautiful movements while the
soundtrack alternates lyrics from the Velvet Underground with original music for
violin, cello and piano.
Some of the most popular documentaries screening at the Festival brought
viewers into the world of performance and music. BALLROOM DANCING from Hungary
takes place in a small village where the inhabitants learn waltzes, tangos and
fox trots. BLIND ORCHESTRA from Egypt focuses on a unique all-female classical
ensemble in Cairo in which all the musicians are blind. CARMEN AMAYA: QUEEN
OF THE GYPSIES, directed by Boston resident Jocelyn Ajami, focuses on the
Barcelona-born flamenco dancer who rose from poverty to international acclaim. It
uses well-chosen archival images to illustrate Amaya's important
contribution to the dance form.
October 17 & 19
It has been an outstanding year so far for French filmmaker Julie Bertucelli.
Her first feature, SINCE OTAR WENT AWAY, debuted in the Critic's Week at
Cannes where it won a prize. It is set in post-Soviet Tbilisi where three
generations of women share a cramped apartment and await word from Otar, son of the
matriarch Eva, who has illegally migrated to France. When the two younger
women learn more about Otar's fate, they feel unable to tell the aged Eva for
fear it will kill her. Bertucelli studied Russian at university and worked as an
assistant to the famed Georgian filmmaker Otar Ioselliani (whom she pays
tribute to with her title). Her love of the country led her to set her film
there. When quizzed about why it had not screened at the recent film festival in
Georgia, Bertucelli confessed that it is based on a true story and that there
really is an aged Georgian grandmother who is not cognizant of the fate of her
son. She feels she cannot show the film in Georgia until this woman passes
away.
SINCE OTAR WENT AWAY won the prize for Best Screenplay at the Festival.

The
award turned out to be a very heavy sculpture of a wolverine, the totem animal
of the festival. Bertucelli, who is three months pregnant with her first
child, laughed as she anticipated the questions she would receive at the security
checkpoints.
The Best Feature Film prize went to OSAMA, directed by Siddiq Barmak from
Afghanistan. This first feature also debuted at Cannes where it bagged several
prizes. It was picked up for American distribution by United Artists and should
be in U.S. theaters next year. In spite of the title, it is not about the
missing terrorist, but rather about a 12-year-old girl who pretends to be a boy
when the Taliban come to power.
HUSH by the St. Petersburg-based documentarian Victor Kossakovsky captured
the Best Documentary prize. A highly original and poetic view of his street,
shot from his window, over the course of a year, HUSH makes full creative use of
all the elements of cinema. For anyone wanting to learn about framing, focus,
camera speed and sound, this film is a must. And it provides an illuminating
portrait of contemporary Russia.
Alissa Simon

October 13
Morocco-born director Hakim Belabbes has taught in the film department of
Chicago’s Columbia College for some time now. His first feature, THREADS,
recently made its world premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival. I
attended the early morning press screening of THREADS at Montreal’s Festival of
New Cinema and Media. The film weaves together a half a dozen different stories
to create a colorful tapestry of life in central Morocco. Linked
thematically, the stories deal with relationships between parents and children and
reflect on how we fail at loving and being loved right.
Although shot in Morocco, THREADS benefited from a collaboration with a
number of Chicago technicians and organizations. Former Chicago Reader Film Critic
Lisa Alspector served as one of the producers and a writing consultant.


Speaking of the Reader, I was shocked to learn via email about the death of
Ted Shen, another of the weekly’s critics. Ted was a sharp and versatile
writer and his presence, in print and in life, will be missed.
Also among the missing, at least according to a new French documentary by
Charlotte Szlovak, is American actress Laurie Zimmer. Zimmer, a husky-voiced
Debra Winger look-alike, starred in Szlovak’s shot in Los Angeles film D’UN JOUR
A L’AUTRE, and went on to work with Jean Eustache, and create a major
impression in John Carpenter’s ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. After losing touch with
Zimmer for nearly 20 years, Szlovak sets out to discover what happened to this
once-promising talent.
Alissa Simon

Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media
October 11-12
Now in its 32nd edition, The Montreal International Festival of New Cinema
and New Media (FCMM) has been around longer than its cross-town rival, the
larger and perhaps better known Montreal World Film Festival which unreels each
August.
Seven years ago, the FCMM was taken under the wing of the Daniel Langlois
Foundation for Art, Science and Technology. Langlois, a software millionaire and
cutting-edge designer, is the perfect godfather for this festival, which
concentrates on auteur films, works that reinvent the language of cinema and
experiment with new technological tools.
Langlois built the Festival a 3-theater, year-round complex, the Excentris,
on St. Laurent, in the heart of Bohemian Montreal. This sleek gray
state-of-the-art building should be a model for all other cinematheque/art centers. The
fantastically comfortable cinemas can show work in every format.

The floors
rise and fall, making the space multi-use. In the front of the building,
ticket sellers sit behind a wall, their faces hologrammed. A ground-floor
restaurant, open to the street, with sidewalk tables seems to be the place to see and
be seen.
In addition to special workshops with renowned filmmakers Werner Herzog,
Peter Greenaway, Robert Lepage and Jiri Barta, the Festival offers an overview of
prizewinners from other international festivals. I finally caught up with
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s melancholy and deeply humanist DISTANT, a
multiple prizewinner from this year’s Cannes.
Alissa Simon

Vancuver International Film Festival – October 10th
A day of non-stop rain. This doesn’t seem to affect anyone local much – it’s
taken in stride. An interesting Korean feature called MEMORIES OF MURDER, by
Bong Joon-ho, who made his name with his previous feature “Barking Dogs
Never Bite.”. The hunt for a serial killer is also a severe critique of the
Korean police in a small town. The film is filled with gallows humor and is
a runaway commercial hit in Korea.
Then the Russian film KOKTEBEL, which won the top prize at the Venice Film
Festival this year. Beautifully shot story of a father with a past hitching
their way from Moscow to the Crimea, this is a film about unresolved
relationships and some wise observations, though it’s marred by its rather
saccharine ending.
The Arena program is along-running documentary series on the BBC, and their
portrait of Peter Sellers THE PETER SELLERS STORY – AS HE FILMED IT is
fascinating. Apparently Sellers was addicted to photographing and filming
his life in home movies from an early age, and an archive of these personal
memories was only recently discovered. Some of the footage is just that –
footage of family and friends at play – but others are more elaborately
staged melodramas. The entire film is composed of this footage with audio
commentary from Sellers’ friends, including the members of the Goon Show
where Sellers got his start, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. Often
married, unhappy in his personal life, a troubled individual by all means
and at the same time a comic genius, this is a riveting and unusual
documentary.

Vancouver International Film Festival – October 9th
There is a very strong lineup of films here in Vancouver. In the documentary
category (here called Nonfiction Features) the portrait of the world which
emerges from the films is not very reassuring. Cambodian director Rithy Path
’s S. 21 THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE is an acidic attempt to come to
terms with the legacy of the Cambodian genocide. Largely shot in the Tuol
Sleng detention center in Phnom Penh, it brings together two (out of the
only three) survivors of the camp together with some of the former fighters
for the Khmer Rouge who partook in the torture and atrocities at the center.
Even more devastating is the 4-hour Canadian documentary by filmmaker Alan
King, DYING AT GRACE. Set in the Salvation Army-run Toronto Hospital, the
film follows five terminal cancer patients during the last weeks of their
lives. Without commentary, the film tries to capture the dignity and
suffering of these five individuals as they face the end of their lives.
John Cadigan’s PEOPLE SAY I’M CRAZY by a talented visual artist who is also
a paranoid-schizophrenic is a diaristic, intimate portrait of an individual
dealing with mental illness. At times emotionally wrenching and sometimes
wise and full of insights, this is an intimate first-hand account of an
individual laying bare his deepest fears, struggle with reality, and
attempts to live a full life.