Assault! Jack the Ripper, one of the treats in store for visitors to Poland's Era New Horizon festival

On the Roman Porno front, I’m most excited we’re screening Yasuharu Hasebe’s quite bonkers Assault! Jack the Ripper. On the pink side, there’s a whole load of treats, but am particularly pleased that women directors are being well-represented, with two films by Yumi Yoshiyuki, who will be there to introduce them, and one by the wonderful Sachi Hamano.

Anyway, the festival’s already been running a few days, so I’ll be arriving in the thick of things and am really looking forward to seeing what the Polish audiences are making of it all. Hope to post either from Poland with my news, or at least not too long after I get back home.

Era New Horizons Festival’s Behind the Pink Curtain retrospective full programme

Leonid Bichevin as the morphine-addicted country doctor Mikhail Alexeivitch Poliakov

I had hoped to have completed my series of reports on the standout films I caught at Thessaloniki some time ago, but have been otherwise occupied with work, illness, hangovers and various other commitments for the past fortnight. Anyway, for my last posting I want to return to the final film I saw, the Russian film Morphia. Now, anyone who has seen any of director Aleksei Balabanov’s previous works might well appreciate that it would be difficult to describe this particular title as ending the festival on a high note. His previous film, Cargo 200 (Gruz 200), a morbidly disquieting look at the mistrust and insecurity of the pre-Perestroika Soviet Union set against the backdrop of the invasion of Afghanistan, must surely lay claim to ranking amongst the top 10 feel-bad films of all time, while Of Freaks and Men (Pro Urodov I Lyudej, 1998), probably his best known title in the West, was a startlingly original, sepia-toned tale of a wealthy aristocratic household in St Petersberg at the turn of the 20th century as it is infiltrated by the corrupting influence of a pair of low-life pornographers who immediately take a shine to the pair of Siamese Twins who live there. Words like ‘subversion’ or ‘abjection’ don’t even begin to cover Balabanov’s darker work, so I knew there wouldn’t be too many people filing out of the Olympion by the end of Morphia with huge grins spread across their faces – in fact, one audience member had to be carried out, not even halfway through proceedings. I, however, have rather a soft spot in my dark heart for Balabanov’s grim vision, and was certainly not disappointed with this latest title.

Burn the Bourgeoisie! Balabanov's Morphia

The basic through-line of Morphia is simple: a young doctor, Mikhail Alexeivitch Poliakov (Leonid Bichevin) is posted to a ramshackle hospital in a godforsaken ice-bound provincial village, where he begins his miserable decent into morphine addiction as the events of the October Revolution of 1917 gradually make their impact across the country. As in Of Freaks and Men, the various scenes are broken up with intertitles, like a silent film, to cue you up for what is to come. An early example the “The First Injection”, signposts the beginning of Poliakov’s secret habit, after an allergic reaction to the dyptheria vaccine he takes following a failed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a local patient dying of the disease.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite as Nurse Anna

It quickly becomes clear that Poliakov is not a particularly accomplished doctor, dashing upstairs to consult his medical texts when expected to deliver a breech birth, giving the excuse to his nurses that he is going to fetch his cigarettes – Morphia, it should be mentioned, is often quite comic, in a particularly black sort of fashion. It was about ten minutes after the “The First Amputation” intertitle that a desperate, audible gasping was heard from the back of the auditorium, the lights came up and the film was stopped for about ten minutes, as the viewer who had fainted was escorted out of the screening, I think the first time I’ve ever witnessed such a thing. Depicted in unflinching detail, the amputation scene primed everyone for the worst for the rest of the film, so much so that after the “The Tracheotomy” title came up, I spent the next ten minutes gazing at my hands, shaking. I haven’t seen an audience so traumatised since Miike’s Audition at Rotterdam Film Festival all those years ago.

Poliakov entertained by his aristocratic neighbours

Grim as it may be, there’s more to Morphia than just a shocking parade of gruesome surgery sequences punctuated by Poliakov’s increasingly desperate drug taking. While deceptively simply staged, the film is beautifully shot in dingy washed-out greys and greens, with a great eye for the period. A night-time sleigh-ride as the doctor is lost in a blizzard, pursued closely by wolves, is one of the most memorable pieces of cinema I’ve witnessed in a long time.

The revolution arrives in town

Morphia is based on the semi-autobiographical stories of Mikhail Bulgakov, adapted by Sergei Bodrov Jr., who acted in several of Balabanov’s earlier films including Brother and War, and who had planned to make the film himself before his death in a rockslide in 2002. Some more blasé critics have dismissed it as “just another addiction film”, but I really loved the mood Balabanov creates here, like in his previous films, conjuring up a particularly grim and unappealing vision of Russia and its past. I was chatting to a Variety journalist a few days before the screening who told me that Balabanov has quite a cult following among young audiences in his own country. Personally I’d love to see a full retrospective of his work over here, because I’ve been mightily impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

Family Fortunes: Romania's The Happiest Girl in the World

One of the notable strands of Thessaloniki is its Balkan Survey section, which this year featured 15 films from countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Turkey, often co-productions with other European industries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland (and in the case of one, Katalin Varga, with a British director at the helm, Peter Strickland), as well as a focus on Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic (Time of Miracles). It’s an area I know next to nothing about, so I was really looking forward to exploring its cinema, but at the end of the day, regrettably, I only caught one film, which is a double shame, because Romanian director Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume) was perhaps the freshest, most memorable work I saw during the festival.

Radu Jude’s The Happiest Girl in the World (Cea mai fericita fata din lume)

Now, cynics might argue that with substantial funding from the Netherlands, films such as The Happiest Girl in the World, like the European-financed Iranian titles that we get to see in the West, do not perhaps give the truest portrait of life in the country where they are filmed, nor reflect local viewing habits, but instead skew their reality to fit the tastes of foreign festival or arthouse audiences (Just a quick note following on from the comment  posted below by the film’s producer; at 10% of the budget, the funding from the Netherlands can’t really be considered that ‘substantial’ – I stand corrected). There might be something in this, but there’s a couple of points that are worth bearing in mind. Firstly, with the relatively small populations of most of the countries in the Balkan region (although with 21 million people living within its borders, Romania is considerably larger than others in the area, with Bucharest the sixth largest city in the European Union), many of the local industries face considerable difficulties maintaining their share of the local market and are reliant on such co-production deals. Secondly, while this particular film offers a critique of the rampant consumerism of a country in which free-market economics is still a relatively new phenomenon, the predicament of Delia Fratila, the unlikely heroine of The Happiest Girl in the World, shouldn’t be too difficult for most viewers to identify with.

Vasile Muraru delivers some fatherly advice to Andreea Bosneag

The film naturalistically documents a particular traumatic day in the life of its 18-year-old protagonist, a day which, by rights, should be cause for celebration. Delia has just won a car in a national competition held by a refreshments company after sending in three juice-bottle labels, and arrives in Bucharest with her parents in tow from the small rural town where they live. Like the other winners she gets to star in the company’s new advertising campaign, appearing alongside her prize while glugging from a bottle of orange juice while delivering the lines “I’m the happiest, luckiest girl in the world.” As soon as she arrives on set however, she starts bickering with her parents, who wish to sell the car and invest the profits in a guest house.

Violeta Haret and Andreea Bosneag

This is basically all there is to the film, which unfolds virtually in real time, as Delia is not only subjected to the haranguing of her domineering mother and father, but as the fading light ups the pressure to wrap the shoot, the director of the advertisement, who in turn is struggling to get his job done under the watchful and often disruptive gaze of the marketing agents that commissioned the campaign.It might sound like a slender premise, but the performances, particularly Andreea Bosneag’s beleaguered central turn, make for surprisingly compelling and often laugh-out-loud-funny viewing, as Delia is forced to perform take after take after failing to deliver her lines with the necessary gusto or fluffing them completely under the stress. Halfway through, someone notices that the orange juice drink doesn’t look suitably, well, ‘orange’, and so the insipid-looking tartrazine-yellow liquid is adulterated with a dash of Coca Cola for the cameras.

The glamorous life of Delia Fratila (Andreea Bosneag)

It’s the basic simplicity of the idea and the mise-en-scene that really impressed me, with most of the action unfolding on the shooting set in the heart of town; one assumes that  most of the people milling around in the background must have thought that a genuine commercial was being shot, not a dramatic feature. For me, this is one of the must-see films of the year. It has already played a number of festivals across the world since its premier at Berlin in February – yes, Toronto again, but also London Film Festival and Bristol’s Encounters, about the same time as Thessaloniki, which shows that there’s a print in the UK at the moment, and its undoubtedly gearing up for a bigger release over here. Ok, so Romanian films might not exactly be everyone’s idea of mainstream entertainment, but anyone with a genuine interest in cinema and its numerous possibilities will most certainly want to check this out.

The Happiest Girl in the World

Interest parties can watch the trailer on youtube and read an interview with the director from its Toronto screening on IndieWIRE.

Iris Berben and Katharina Schüttler in Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag)

Five days back in the bitter chill of London and Greece is already beginning to seem like a distant memory. Nevertheless, I still have a couple more films I want to revisit from Thessaloniki before moving onto other things. One of the things about festivals is that, after a number of days of rapacious film-viewing, you begin to notice certain themes or trends emerging in your habits. By the end of the first weekend, I’d realised that over half the films I’d watched were from German directors, mainly due to the choice of Fatih Akin’s multi-cultural comedy Soup Kitchen as the opening night screening and the exhaustive Werner Herzog retrospective. The first Herzog film I caught which I hadn’t seen before, the hypnotic 1989 TV documentary Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun also highlighted another trend at the festival, which was the number of films either set or made in Africa. The Egyptian film Heliopolis I looked at in some length in my last posting, but there was also Sherry Horman’s Desert Flower, based on the best-selling memoirs of Somali supermodel Waris Dirie, the Belgian/French co-production of The Day God Walked Away (Le jour où Dieu est parti en voyage) directed by Philippe Van Leeuw, whose portrait of a young woman caught in the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide earned Ruth Nirere the best actress trophy, and Chasing Moses, a well-meaning but otherwise truly execrable offering set in Nairobi from local boy Alexandros Konstantaras – I don’t want to be too cruel as I understand the director’s motives for this amateurish camcorder atrocity was to give Kenyans a chance to star and participate in the making of a feature, but really, this was not film festival material, and to be honest, there are filmmakers in Kenya already making far superior works to this (for example, Michael Wanguhu’s excellent documentary on the new Kenyan hip-hop scene, Hip Hop Colony from 2006).

Anyway, back to Germany, a country that seems to be coming out with a lot of really interesting stuff at the moment. Susanne Schneider’s The Day Will Come (Es kommt der Tag), actually a co-production with France, also highlighted another trend in the festival, films about terrorists, also the subject of Koji Wakamatsu’s docudrama United Red Army and Filipino director John Torres’ experimental (and somewhat self-indulgent) montage of observational footage shot in Manila and Berlin, Todo Todo Teros (2006), screened as part of the Philippines Rising section. Schneider’s film bears little relation to either of these aforementioned titles, neither concerned with reconstructing the facts of true-life events like Wakamatsu’s recent masterpiece or fellow-German Uli Edel’s slickly superficial and quite unsatisfying The Baader Meinhof Complex from last year, nor a more conceptual examination of what is meant by the word ‘terrorism’ as Torres’ film. Instead it’s a character study, centred around a proud middle-aged woman, Judith, whose radical activities in the 1970s forced her to disappear off to France where she has now forged a new life living on a family-owned vineyard in the Alsace region with a French husband and son and daughter. When her daughter, Alice, abandoned as a child when Judith went underground to avoid police capture, turns up on their doorstep incognito, she is forced to confront her past.

An awkward family gathering in The Day Will Come.

I have to admit, I didn’t go into The Day Will Come with the highest of expectations, probably in part due to the rather unmemorable title, which had me referring to it as “that German film” whenever it came up in conversation during the rest of the week. The film isn’t interested in detailing the true-life activities of the German red movement of the 1970s, and starts off slowly. Just as it picks up and we’re geared into expecting a very European style of psychological suspense thriller in the vein of, say, Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, the film suddenly moves into more interesting territory as it lays open its themes of guilt, self-justification and inter-generational conflict, with a standout scene where Judith’s aged bon-vivant in-laws turn up unexpectedly for a family lunch in which Alice threatens to expose her estranged mother’s skeletons in the closet constantly threatening to career off into Mike Leigh levels of catastrophic awkwardness.

Iris Berben confronts the past in The Day Will Come

One of the most interesting things is the Alsace setting, a formerly German-speaking area of France. Even though the film doesn’t really emphasize the political motivations of Judith’s peers, she does state that theirs was a rebellion against the wartime complicity of her parent’s generation, “everything we despised incarnate”, before railing against the self-absorbed complacency of her iPod generation children who’ve never had to fight for anything and addressing the wartime resistance activities of their French grandfather as a case where underground activity is perfectly justifiable. This is something that so many seem to people forget when they violently denounce street demonstrations and political activism – back in the Edwardian period there was little support for the suffragettes, and nearer in time in the 1980s, police regularly clashed with Anti-Apartheid demonstrators, yet who today would deny women the vote or suggest that black South Africans should be treated as second-class citizens in their own country? There is a fine line between when youthful idealism tips into violent or criminal activity. Mercifully, The Day Will Come doesn’t invite us to make easy judgements on its characters, opening up arguments about the validity of the more extreme actions of the the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s at a time when so many of us are content to sit shrugging our shoulders impotently in the face of world events.

Katharina Schuttler as the abandoned daughter Alice

I’m not sure whether The Day Will Come has much in the way of distribution as yet. Like several of the titles at Thessaloniki this year, it played at Toronto International Film Festival in September: you can read a little more about it here. It’s a deceptively-simple slow-burner of a movie, but incredibly compelling and thoughtfully constructed with some great performances, especially Katharina Schuttler as Alice, which earned her a special mention from the jury. One of the bests of the fest for me. I hope it gets the opportunity to screen more widely.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-3-the-day-will-come/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-2-heliopolis/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-2-heliopolis/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:34:23 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=173

Hotel receptionist Engy (Hanan Motawe) talks to friend in Heliopolis.

While I’m still on my Mediterranean buzz, with the words of Durrell still ringing in my ears, I thought I’d focus on my next pick from Thessaloniki, Heliopolis (Masr El Gedida), an Egyptian film written and directed by Ahmad Abdalla. I think it would be fair to assume that most reading this won’t be too clued up on Egyptian cinema. I certainly know I’m not. I do know Egypt boasts a sizeable commercial industry that makes films primarily for local consumption, with little if any pitched at the Western art house market. I know also that it’s been going for some decades, probably longer than anywhere else on the African continent. I also know, because I learnt this at the Q&A with the director and lead actor Khaled Abol Naga after the screening, that currently it is almost entirely entertainment-driven, and that Heliopolis is very rare example of independent production in Egypt. That’s not to say that its a cheap, low-budget offering. In fact it’s an incredibly polished looking piece that actually came about through a voluntary collaboration between a number of major stars and accomplished technical figures in the industry (the director’s background is in editing) all united with the desire to make the type of film that the mainstream couldn’t, or rather wouldn’t, support.

Heliopolis director Ahmad Abdalla

I liked Heliopolis a lot. It presented a portrait of the city of Cairo and its inhabitants that I’d never imagined, modern, sophisticated, yet facing an uncertain future while gazing wistfully back at the past. It was moving, insightful, and more than a little melancholic. The multi-threaded narrative charts a day in the life of a number of different characters: a hotel receptionist who dreams futilely of living in Paris, a young couple about to set up home together as they joylessly shop for domestic appliances, a security guard who secretly befriends a stray dog for company while he stands alone in his sentry box, a doctor frustrated by red tape in his attempts to get a visa to move to Canada, and a university student, Ibrahim, researching the personal histories of the city’s ethnic minorities.

Khaled Abol Naga as Ibrahim

It is this latter strand that is the main theme of Heliopolis, which takes its title from a suburb of Cairo built by the Belgians in 1905. Once a thriving melting pot where Europeans, Egyptians, Jews and Armenians mingled freely, it stands as a microcosm for the whole country in which only traces of this cosmopolitan past remain. I should say that I’ve never visited Cairo, and that the impression I always got about the city from other people is that it is a dusty, sweltering, chaotic and exhausting place. My experience of Egypt is limited to a cruise down the Nile from Luxor to Aswan, both places that look like they’ve enjoyed considerably better days, and, returning to Lawrence Durrell, reading the four books in The Alexandria Quartet.

Modern Love: Newly engaged couple Maha (Aya Soliman) and Ali (Atef Yousef)

The image of modern Cairo presented in Heliopolis really drew my attention to this discrepancy between how I’d imagined the country through Durrell’s prose than through the reality I encountered in the more arid regions of my last trip. The film nostalgically harks back to this time when Egypt was a far more multi-cultural country than it is today, before the Europeans left en masse following Nasser’s assumption of the presidency of the country in 1954 (the events of Mountolive, the third book in The Alexandria Quartet, serve as a fictionalized allegory for the 1956 Suez crisis and touch upon the rise of pan-Arab nationalism during this period). Nasser was seen as bringing about a new era of modernization and social reform, but fifty years on, there are many in the country who seem to be questioning where it has all led.

Looking to the past: Khaled Abol Naga

This is not just some colonialist reading of the film on my part. This was a point that was emphasized during the Q&A, when Ahmad Abdalla and Khaled Abol Naga were joined on stage by a respected Egyptian film critic (whose name, unfortunately, I didn’t catch), who directly posed the question just what exactly was the revolution that brought Nasser to the world stage for, stating that modern Egypt, however you define the term ‘modern’, is more insular and less progressive-looking than it was back in the 1950s. There’s a scene in which Naga’s character Ibrahim is stopped while capturing the disappearing older parts of the city on video camera to form a visual archive, and ordered to cease filming by the police due to ‘anti-terrorist laws’. The consumerist paradises where the young couple shop for a new fridge are austere and near-desolate compared with these older, more vibrant areas, as the melting pot of the original Belgian district succumbs to modernity to be replaced with anonymous, gated enclaves for the city’s wealthier citizens. And the overall tone of the film is that each of the characters is stuck in the endless purgatory of their daily lives with little hope for the future.

Hanan Motawe

I was a little surprised that the rather scathing view of contemporary Egyptian society presented in the film, not to mention sub-stories in which several of the characters try to hook up with a local drug dealer, hasn’t fallen foul of the censors, but apparently it screened fairly widely on its home turf and has also played the Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi – it also showed at Toronto and Vancouver festivals just before Thessaloniki. It’s undoubtedly a political work, though the exact nature of its politics might be lost on audiences coming to it without the historical context provided by the Q&A. On another level though, I found the characters compelling, and their lifestyles, predicaments and general frustrations with their lots not a million miles away from those of any other major city-dweller. It was certainly intriguing enough to pique my curiosity and inspire me to learn a little more about Egypt, and also to keep my eye out for other films of its ilk, as it seems that there is a genuine desire among filmmakers there to make films outside of the commercial industry which have more to communicate than just mere entertainment. I hope the film will travel beyond the festival circuit, and advise interested parties to check out this interview with Abdalla on indieWIRE.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-2-heliopolis/feed/ 0 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-1-samson-delilah/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-1-samson-delilah/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:35:54 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=162

Inside and Out: The Olympion Theatre as projection space

Whisked back from beneath the limpid Aegean skies to my humdrum day-to-day existence on the more austere side of the European Union, I’m reminded of the words of Lawrence Durrell in Balthazar, the second book in his Alexandria Quartet: “We live lives based on selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.” It’s not to difficult to appreciate the huge influence Greece had in Durrell’s own fiction, but one wonders what he would have made of this year’s Thessaloniki International Film Festival, which was inaugurated exactly fifty years ago, around the time he wrote these words, and drew to a close last night. I think he might have liked it. The wonderful selection of films from across the globe gave an impressive insight into the various lives lived in such far flung reaches of the world as Australia, South America, Somalia and the Philippines, and in this context, the question “Why Cinema Now?” that served as the tag-line for its 50^th anniversary and whose text formed part of the montage of images projected across the facade of the impressive Olympion Theater, seemed particularly well posed.

The madding crowd, outside the John Casavettes screen.

Like many avid consumers of world cinema, I often feel I live in a different reality from the many whose opinions are informed by the more pervasive voices of the dominant mass media rather than the more rarefied world inhabited by the film curator and habitual festival-goer. What can we possibly understand about the daily lives of, say, an Australian aborigine, the middle-class metropolitan population of Cairo or those who were caught in the midst of the Rwandan genocide if the only windows on to the rest of the world we ever have access to are the increasingly conservative medium of television, the weighted voices of news pundits, or the mass entertainment opiates that overwhelm our cities’ cinemas and video rental and retail outlets?

Why Cinema Now? Festival poster at Thessaloniki airport.

The global film industry is going through a funny phase at the moment. While technological advances mean there’s more films being produced across the world than at any other time (especially in countries without well-established industries), the current crisis in distribution, in part due to this large number of films out there at present, means that many of the titles I am about to mention will largely go unseen outside of the festival circuit, which is a shame. In all other ways, we are far better connected with each other than ever before, but not only are opportunities for large groups of strangers to meditate together on visions of distant lands within a shared communal space rapidly dwindling, even finding information about what is available is a vast challenge. There were plenty of films screened at the festival that wouldn’t have looked out of place in London’s arthouse cinemas about ten years ago. Now, sadly, I’m not so sure this is the case.

The main pier forms an atmospheric hub for the festival.

Thessaloniki’s unique geographical position as a nexus between the European Union, the Middle East and the Balkan States, its cosmopolitan cultural mix and its long and influential history no doubt had a huge bearing on the selection of the films that screened there. True, some of these have played other international festivals already (a couple of titles came straight from last month’s London Film Festival), but the general impression I had was that more room was made for those films that reflected the general tastes and ambiance of the area rather than titles from, say North America or Western Europe. (A great film though it may be, the typically grimy British socio-realism of Samantha Morton’s directorial debut The Unloved seemed to attract fewer bums on seats than some of the other films in competition). Unfortunately, while Greece’s main festival was initially established to showcase the national cinema, for various political reasons which I won’t detail here, a large number of the country’s directors decided to boycott Thessaloniki this year, so the local product wasn’t so well reflected.

The poster for Blue Film Woman, part of the popular Beyond Pinku Eiga programme.

The competition results were announced last night: for more details you can check out the winners on the Variety website. I’ll have to confess I didn’t see many of these, but given that all the titles that competed are to be screened over the next two weeks in 17 cities throughout Greece and the amount of media interest generated by the guests who attended, it seems that Thessaloniki is a pretty good place for any filmmaker to showcase their work. For the ten days of the festival, there were films playing simultaneously in every one of the six screens, and the level of attendances was really quite staggering. There were a number of times I couldn’t get into the screenings I wanted, but on the flipside, one has to applaud any festival that can get in over 100 people to watch a double bill of Blue Film Woman and Gushing Prayer that started at midnight on a Friday night. The Beyond Pinku Eiga programme that presented my raison d’etre for being there was hugely successful – and I wish to say a big thanks to Lefteris, Myriam, Natasha and the rest of the Independence Days staff who made it all happen and who made my stay so pleasurable. There’s a brief article in Variety about this program too, but I’ve said enough about pink films over the past few months, so instead I’d rather focus on some of the other standouts from my trip.

Still time for sightseeing: in front of Aristotle statue

Coming back from any festival that boasts such an overwhelming amount of material presents a chance to bemoan what one has missed and celebrate what one saw. I probably caught about 20 films in total, while also making good use of my non-viewing time to do a bit of sightseeing and enjoy the city and probably the last bit of decent sunshine I’ll get to experience over the next six months. Over the coming days I want to write a bit about my favourites and hope that in some small way my words might shine a light on films that you might not get a chance to hear about otherwise.

Cannes Camera d'Or winner Samson & Delilah

The first truly great title I caught was Samson & Delilah (film website here), Australia’s shot at the Best Foreign Language Film for the 2010 Academy Awards. Yes, that’s right, foreign language – it’s perhaps too easy for us on the other side of the world to forget that Australia does have its own indigenous population, but the other thing one might note about Warwick Thornton’s film is there’s precious little in the way of any dialogue at all. Samson & Delilah really caught me by surprise. The one thing about focussing on Japanese cinema is that most of the festivals I get invited to focus primarily on either Asian film or genre/cult material. Until now, I’d assumed that The Horseman or Coffin Rock were the best contemporary Australian cinema had to offer. I’m happy to have been proven wrong.

Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah

Samson & Delilah is set in a remote aboriginal community in the Northern Territories (it was filmed near Alice Springs) and follows the relationship between a young man and woman, the Samson and Delilah of the title, in an environment that offers little in the way of hope or even basic material comfort. Samson might not be most girls’ dream date, but nonetheless, he’s the best on offer, and given the options in life afforded to him, one wouldn’t expect him to be any different. Initially resistant to his crude advances, the death of her grandmother leaves Delilah with little other place to turn, and their life together as they leave their tiny community soon descends into a nightmare of petrol-sniffing, poverty, hunger and homelessness. The early scenes detail the two protagonists’ mundane lives in their community in wordless detail and with a Groundhog Day-like monotony. Despite the miserable trajectory of their existence, the nuanced performances balance delicate moments of humour with considerable pathos. Like the best of the films I aim to cover from the festival, this is a story that if written down would appear slight and inconsequential. It masterfully harnesses the unique ability of cinema to convey emotions and ideas in images, and by doing so transcends the limits of the medium. Aside from the beautiful cinematography, the one thing that really stood out for me was the adroit use of sound. I remember little in the way of background music, but instead the emotional intensity of the scenes are underscored by the use of natural sound: for example, the scene in which Samson finally loses his rag with the Verandah Band that play continuously outside his bedroom unfolds in a screech of amplified feedback as he attacks the guitarist. It comes as little surprise to hear that Thornton’s credits as director, writer and DOP on the film sit alongside another credit, as a composer. He and sound designer Liam Egan have clearly worked very closely together to achieve such a remarkable synergy of sound and image, resulting in a remarkable work of visual storytelling in which dialogue is all but redundant.

Samson & Delilah

Samson & Delilah won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at Cannes Film Festival this year, and also played London Film Festival. A French release is imminent, and a UK release planned for earlier next year. So regardless of what I said earlier, this at least is a title that will get the wider audience it so deserves. At least one Australian critic has labelled it “the best (some would say the first) Australian film yet made”, and I for one am inclined to agree with him. A week and half since I saw it and it is still vividly and indelibly burned into my brain.

]]> http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/thessaloniki-flashback-part-1-samson-delilah/feed/ 2 http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/greece-is-the-word-mid-fest-thoughts-on-thessaloniki/ http://jaspersharp.com/blog/news/2009/11/greece-is-the-word-mid-fest-thoughts-on-thessaloniki/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:51:10 +0000 Jasper http://jaspersharp.com/blog/?p=161 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….

Koji Wakamatsu's United Red Army

The buzz surrounding Koji Wakamatsu is spreading across the globe at quite a pace at the moment. I’d like to think that Behind the Pink Curtain had something to do with all this, but the reality is that it is the other way round – I have benefited immensely due to the release of the finest film of Wakamatsu‘s career, and arguably the most important Japanese film of the decade, United Red Army, coinciding roughly with my book’s publication last October. The film is screening in the Cinemafamily theatre in LA this very evening, to be followed by a handful of  classics from his pinku eiga period in the 1960s, and French viewers already have the first in a series of box-sets of his work out there on DVD.

Masao Adachi's Gushing Prayer

My next Wakamatsu-related announcement is something I have had a hand in though, a special selection of pink and Roman Porno films that will be screening at the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The eleven chosen titles will be shown as part of the PINKU EIGA: BEYOND PINK programme in the Independence Days section, which I put together with critic and festival programmer Lefteris Adamidis. Films to be screened include Kan Mukai’s Blue Film Woman (1969), Masao Adachi’s Gushing Prayer (1971), Mamoru Watanabe’s Secret Hot Spring Resort: Starfish at Night (1971), Tatsumi Kumashiro’s Woods Are Wet (1973) and a selection of Noboru Tanaka films, including the rarely-screened Beauty’s Exotic Dance: Torture! (1977).

Kan Mukai's Blue Film Woman

I’m going to be heading over to the festival at the end of the next week, which I’m really looking forward to, as I’ve never actually been to Greece before. I hope to pop up a few posts while I’m there. Most exciting of all is that Wakamatsu himself will be coming to introduce United Red Army and three earlier films, Secret Behind the Walls (1965), Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and Shinjuku Mad (1970). I’ve met him on several occasions before, twice at Frankfurt’s Nippon Connection, who have long championed his work, and one particularly surreal night over a drink in a bar in Tokyo’s Golden Gai – I think by now he’s realised I’m not the same person as that certain French Wakamatsu fan who directed Irreversible!

Koji Wakamatsu's Running In Madness, Dying In Love

Anyway, its going to be really interesting to see how these films go down with a Greek festival audiences. Several of the programme’s titles I’ve already screened in London, Montreal and Frankfurt, but this will be my first chance to see the new prints of Running in Madness, Dying in Love (1969) and Shinjuku Mad (1970) on a big screen, to me two of his most interesting works, (they’re also playing in LA – so if you see them, feel free to post your comments on them)  and am looking forward to catching United Red Army again.

Koji Wakamatsu's Shinjuku Mad

Hopefully this is the first of many airings of Wakamatsu’s films across the world, now that they’ve been newly subbed for foreign distribution (one of the reasons the director was so woefully underrepresented at last years Wild Japan season of Japanese erotic films at the BFI in London). And I’m sure some bold English-language DVD distributor will pick up on them before too long too.

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