It’s been quite some days since I touched down in Thessaloniki, and as is the usual case when you arrive at a new festival in a strange city, it has taken me a few days to find my feet and put some of my thoughts up. Well, this was always going to be something of a busman’s holiday so constant updates were never really on the cards, but I had intended to write perhaps a few posts at least.
I’m here for the full 10-day stretch, and aside from a few introductions, don’t have many duties, so it’s a great excuse to watch films that I usually wouldn’t get a chance to experience and to enjoy a new city. I’m feeling a bit discombobulated at the moment, as most of the filmmaking guests are only staying a few days, so for example Koji Wakamatsu has already gone after appearing over the weekend to promote United Red Army here, and several of the lively group of Philipino directors, including the charismatic Khavn de la Cruz, also departed in the small hours of the morning. I guess a fresh load of new faces will be arriving over the coming days.
I think the relatively relaxed atmosphere of the city has encouraged a certain lethargy in me after such a hectic couple of months, and while I’m catching a lot of films, I’m also catching up on a fair amount of sleep too, despite the fact that the screenings for the Beyond Pink sidebar I helped with all begin after midnight – things keep going pretty late here, and though its a bit of a pain having to stay up so late while remaining relatively clear-headed, its no real hardship and I’m really impressed with the level of interest these films are getting. For example, last night saw Wakamatsu’s Secret Acts Behind Walls playing alongside Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic on two of the five screens used by the festival, and both were more or less full, making this the most successful by far of all the pink retrospectives I’ve worked on across the world since the book came out.
Thessaloniki International Film Festival is the first time I’ve ever been to Greece, something that’s always been of a mystery to me as having grown up reading the books of Lawrence and Gerald Durrell, and John Fowles’ The Magus, the country has always seems cosily familiar without my ever having visited. Somehow I always knew I’d love it, the food, the relaxed pace of life (the Rough Guide to Greece describes it as ‘sybaritic’), the sense of such a deep-rooted underlying history and culture. The city feels at once familiarly European, but somehow slightly more exotic than other Mediterranean countries I’ve visited like France, Italy Spain, for example. I guess Thessaloniki’s geographic situation, right in the northeast of Greece in the region of Macedonia accounts for its rather special atmosphere, reflected in its strong programming of Balkan cinema. Its the country’s second largest city and a major port, yet not too touristy. The people are very friendly, with some of the most striking-looking women in the world, and the prices are cheap. Festival or no festival, I know I’ll be back to this part of world pretty soon.
Time prevents me writing too much about the actual films at the moment, and I’d also wanted to post some of my photos, but annoyingly forgot to bring my connection lead to download them to my computer, so this will have to wait till I get back to London next week. One thing that did dawn on me though was that in the first few days, most of the films I’d seen were from Germany. There’s a complete Werner Herzog retrospective, with Herzog arriving in town for the next weekend, allowing me to catch up on some of his lesser-known documentaries that I’d probably not get a chance to see elsewhere. Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen was quite an inspired choice for the opening screening. True, it’s comedy was fairly laboured at times, but its easy going charm and story of a Greek immigrant in Germany’s attempts to keep his restaurant going against all odds went down well with local audiences here while presenting a positively multi-cultural image of Europe that would have had Robert Kilroy-Silk weeping. Another very powerful German film was The Day Will Come, a story about a former 1970s activist who disappears underground after abandoning her daughter, and finds her past catching up with her and her new family who run a vineyard in Alsace, by the German border. This film received its premiere hear in Thessaloniki, and was a really pleasant surprise.
Lots more other strong works too: I’ll write later about Samson and Delilah, this year’s Australian contender for the Best Foreign Language Oscar (although its Aboriginal characters actually barely speak at all), the polished Egyptian indie Heliopolis, and Dennis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique, a Montreal-based equivalent to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Right now I’ve got to dash and watch a film….
Posted at 17:51 on 18 November 2009
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