Oh, the irony! As you read this, red carpets are being tacked into place and security measures unfolded in preparation for the Oscars in LA in a few hours. Also as you read this, DHL packages are being unpacked, film prints unspooled and reels double-checked in preparation for Cyprus Film Days, the island’s biggest annual film festival. Meanwhile, in their wisdom, commercial cinemas have chosen to piggyback on Oscar hype by releasing two of the five Best Picture nominees – both, incidentally, pretty good – on the same weekend. It’s all happening!
In truth, I can think of some reasons not to highlight Cyprus Film Days over Michael Clayton or Juno. For a start, it’s hardly the only film festival in Cyprus. In the past month alone we’ve had a French and a German festival, and hopefully the Friends of the Cinema will soon be unleashing their European Film Fest, which last year eclipsed CFD (the Friends also get a piece of the action this year, with some CFD screenings taking place at the Cine Studio). Nor is CFD so much more prestigious than the other festivals. Since we’re talking Oscars, the just-ended German fest included the Best Picture winners at the German Oscars both for last year (the powerful Four Minutes) and the year before (the overrated Lives of Others) – and don’t get me started on why the German Oscars get around a zillionth of the exposure of the American Oscars. But we never ran a special piece on that (I know, mea culpa), so why should we do one on Cyprus Film Days?
It gets worse: all films at this year’s CFD are being shown with Greek subtitles only, making most of them inaccessible to most readers of this paper. Again, this contrasts badly with other festivals, most of which include a few films with English subs. But CFD is different in one important respect: it’s an event, a special occasion, standing violently apart from business-as-usual. Its schedule makes it special – one week, 22 films, two films a night, meaning it can only be experienced to the full by immersing yourself, leaving quotidian life behind for seven days. And its films make it special: not all are acclaimed or well-known, but the 22 include (by my count) 12 of the adventurous filmgoer’s must-sees of 2007, plus a couple of Honourable Mentions.
What we have here is basically Cannes 2007, almost all the big titles stemming from last year’s Competition and sidebars. Most of CFD now repeats titles shown in the ‘European Panorama’ in Athens every October (both are programmed by the same man, Cyprus-born critic Ninos Fenek Mikellides), which explains the Cannes bias – Cannes is in May, so its main titles have Greek distribution by October – as well as the Greek subtitles. Showing this week are the winner of the Golden Palm at Cannes, the winner of the Grand Prize (i.e. second place), the winner of Best Actor, and the winner of Best Screenplay.
Last year’s Golden Palm went to 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, also known (unofficially) as ‘that Romanian abortion movie’. I haven’t seen it yet – and very much look forward to it – but I have seen The Mourning Forest (**), a deeply-felt, fuzzy-minded Japanese drama about an old man and a young woman (patient and nurse, respectively) getting lost in the titular forest. Both are grieving in obscure ways, both have unfinished business to perform – and director Naomi Kawase linked the film to Shinto philosophy in her lengthy and passionate acceptance speech when she (rather unexpectedly) won the Grand Prize, but it also seems perilously close to New Age pabulum. “Let’s pray to the wind together,” says the old man, shortly after our heroine loses the signal on her mobile phone; the forest, with its animist overtones, is a safe place where modern inhibitions can be lost and the Healing Process ™ can take place. Kawase finds a lot of ‘beautiful’ images – a misty forest, an embrace by firelight, wind on grass, people walking between lush green terraces – but the rhythm doesn’t change and onscreen geography is muddled (probably deliberately), making the trip a shapeless shamble to a known destination. It’s a hard slog.
The same may be said of several films in the CFD line-up – though we also need to add right away that one person’s slog is another’s transcendental experience. It’s always misguided to separate films into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’; when a slow-paced film touches the shape of your soul, you never want it to end (when it doesn’t, it just seems … well, slow). I was underwhelmed by Mourning Forest but Kawase’s previous film, the similarly languid Shara (still unavailable in Cyprus), is one of my favourites. Similarly, Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov is an arthouse staple – The Sun, his sly daguerreotype of Emperor Hirohito, screened at CFD 2006 – and I see why some people love his latest, Alexandra (*). This has a salt-of-the-earth grandma coming to visit her officer grandson at the front – and of course it’s a veiled attack on the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya and elsewhere. “You can destroy, but when will you learn to rebuild?” chides Grandma, and goes into town where she bonds with the locals (“Give us our freedom,” pleads one); the film isn’t as didactic as that may sound – partly because it’s hard to be too explicit in Putin’s Russia – but it does get repetitive, saying most of what it has to say in the first half-hour. After that it’s mood, panning slowly round the shirtless, despondent-looking conscripts; war intrudes, but only briefly.
Also on the slate is The Banishment, another Russian film that played at Cannes and won Best Actor for Konstantin Lavronenko. Needless to say, that’s high on my must-see list, and I’d also love to catch You, the Living (***) again – a surreal and mordant Swedish sketch-comedy that may well seem unique if you never saw the director’s previous (very similar) film, Songs From the Second Floor. Then there’s Control (**), one of the few English-language movies – a black-and-white biography of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, modestly effective though it never quite sheds the clich?s of the dead-celeb biopic.
It’s impossible to plough through the full array of offerings at CFD. They include three Greek titles, which I always view (perhaps unfairly) as a sop to the local audience, a Cypriot documentary from 1988, one timeless oldie – Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, from 1962 – and a few more Cannes titles, including Import Export (****) which I’d single out as THE film to watch (along with ‘that Romanian abortion movie’) if you can handle German with Greek subtitles. This is actually Austrian, made by Ulrich Seidl, a director with more than a passing interest in the shocking and grotesque; I’ve never much liked what I’ve seen of his work – at least till this wildly ambitious panorama, probably the most important European film (as in ‘film about Europe’) of the past few years.
There are two stories, ‘Import’ and ‘Export’ defined according to which side of the East-West divide one inhabits – a two-tier Europe, the Iron Curtain turned into the Money Curtain. On one level, it’s a simple story of exploitation: a Ukrainian girl doing middle-class dirty work in Austria – as a maid, prostitute and nurse in an old people’s home – while a thuggish neo-Nazi type travels in the opposite direction, seeking sex and easy money in Slovakia. Yet it’s also more complex, because both sides are lost on the other’s territory – and meanwhile Old (literally) Europe lies in its sickbed like the nurse’s senile patients, waiting for death or demographic disaster, and the disaffected skinhead turns out to be looking for “harmony”, not just a lout after all. Everything here is power relationships – sleazeball and hooker, maid and employers, a man with a dog and a woman who’s afraid of dogs – pessimistic Seidl possibly suggesting that imbalance is human nature, “harmony” not really tenable. The film has extended set-pieces instead of a flowing narrative, going from sequence to sequence, making its case more devastatingly with each new nugget: West and East like two wounded people, desperately clinging to each other. Cyprus Film Days would be welcome for this film alone.
Here’s the full programme of films at Cyprus Film Days. Get in touch with participating cinemas for more information.
NIC-P = Nicosia, Pantheon Cinema
NIC-CS = Nicosia, Cine Studio
LIM = Limassol, Rialto Theatre
YOU THE LIVING: NIC-P, 25/2, 8 p.m.; LIM, 1/3, 10 p.m.
THE BANISHMENT: NIC-P, 25/2, 10 p.m.; NIC-CS, 2/3, 9 p.m.
THE MOURNING FOREST: NIC-P, 26/2, 8 p.m.; LIM, 28/2, 10 p.m.
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: NIC-P, 26/2, 10 p.m.; LIM, 2/3, 8 p.m.
PERIOUSIAKA STOIXEIA: NIC-P, 27/2, 6 p.m.
LE BLUES ENTRE LES DENTS: NIC-P, 27/2, 8 p.m.
RULES OF LIES: NIC-P, 27/2, 10 p.m.; LIM, 26/2, 10 p.m.
THE MAN FROM LONDON: NIC-P, 28/2, 8 p.m.; LIM, 1/3, 8 p.m.
ALEXANDRA: NIC-P, 28/2, 10 p.m.; LIM, 26/2, 8 p.m.
TRIMITHI: NIC-P, 29/2, 6 p.m.
CONTROL: NIC-P, 29/2, 8 p.m.; LIM, 27/2, 8 p.m.
I EPISTROFI: NIC-P, 29/1, 10 p.m.; LIM, 27/2, 10 p.m.
NICOS KAZANTZAKIS: NIC-P, 1/3, 6 p.m.
SOMEONE ELSE: NIC-P, 1/3, 8 p.m.
CHIHWASEON: NIC-P, 1/3, 10 p.m.
NAZIM HIKMET: NIC-P, 2/3, 6 p.m.; LIM, 29/2, 10 p.m.
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS: NIC-P, 2/3, 8 p.m.; LIM, 25/2, 10 p.m.
DAS FRAULEIN: NIC-CS, 25/2, 9 p.m.; LIM, 2/3, 10 p.m.
IMPORT EXPORT: NIC-CS, 26/2, 9 p.m.; LIM, 29/2, 8 p.m.
L’ECLISSE: NIC-CS, 27/2, 9 p.m.
THE MARK OF CAIN: NIC-CS, 28/2, 9 p.m.
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN: NIC-CS, 29/2, 9 p.m.
SELON CHARLIE: NIC-CS, 1/3, 9 p.m.; LIM, 28/2, 8 p.m.
