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.

Posted at 18:49 on 26 November 2009 Filed under news.

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• Iris Berben
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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.

Posted at 19:34 on 24 November 2009 Filed under news.

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• Egyptian cinema
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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.

Posted at 16:35 on 23 November 2009 Filed under news.

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