This year marked the 50th birthday of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, though it hasn’t always been “international”. Indeed, for much of that half-century it was rather parochial, a hotbed for the minor triumphs and fierce rivalries of the perpetually underachieving Greek film industry. It was only in the early 90s that non-Greek titles started to be shown, the emphasis shifting firmly to a more cosmopolitan vibe (all films are screened with both Greek and English subtitles) – and this year, albeit unwittingly, it went to the other extreme, long-standing frustration with the Fest’s awards system prompting a boycott by Greek filmmakers who declined en masse to allow their films to be shown.
For a certain stripe of film buff (like myself), who only cares about watching as many excellent films as possible, the absence of local product was no great loss; inevitably, showcasing the entirety of Greek and Cypriot production leaves you with a handful of gems and a lot of dross, and if something exquisite does turn up it’ll doubtless play in Cyprus cinemas eventually (though we’re still waiting for Tale 52 from last year’s festival). Yet the dearth of Greek-language movies did have an insidious effect, in muffling that vague, precious thing known as festival ‘buzz’ – the overheard debates, word-of-mouth recommendations and passionate partisanship that animates a festival, gives it the sense of a living community. Thessaloniki is a world-class event – but the vast majority of attendees are still Greek, and Greek films provide a handy rallying-point. Without them, you’re forced to talk about Sakis Rouvas playing a serial-killer in Duress.
Anecdotal evidence suggested that audiences were slightly down on previous years; only a few films prompted the familiar mad scrums, unruly mobs and cinemas packed to bursting with latecomers sitting in the aisles. Some of that was down to rising prices (tickets now cost 7 Euros). With admirable frankness, the Fest’s daily newspaper published a vox pop carried out among random punters, including the comments of a disaffected student named Sultana Papaioannou who opined that “it used to be different. The ‘Festival experience’ was that you could stay in the cinemas from early morning and leave whenever you liked, for a small price. Now that’s vanished, and the Festival has become more commercial”. ‘Commercial’! Is there any greater insult in the world of arthouse movie fans?
Then again, maybe audiences were just more selective: it’s been almost 20 years since the Fest went global, time enough to realise that not all festival films are created equal. Beware the Indonesian drama called Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, for instance. It may have won a prize at Rotterdam, but what you got for your 7 Euros was a vague pro-tolerance, pro-democracy Message – the better to endear itself with Western programmers – recurring motifs ranging from firecrackers to TV evangelists to Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ (played at least half-a-dozen times, often with characters singing along), skeletal plot and characters plus a long, explicit scene involving a gay threesome – which is fine in itself, but probably not for the dad with an 8-year-old daughter sitting a few seats down from me (I assume the little girl had arrived with thoughts of little piggies taking to the skies). Festival films are like blind dates; things can get ugly sometimes.
Notably, audiences were still there for the big movies. Lebanon, for instance – the Israeli war film that won the Golden Lion at Venice – was sold out both times it played (I had to catch it at an earlier Press screening), its rep and subject-matter persuading punters to part with those precious 7 Euros. This is a companion-piece to Waltz With Bashir, last year’s Israeli nightmare of the war in Lebanon in the early 1980s – and, as in that film, there’s a certain amount of self-exculpation going on. Almost all of it takes place inside a tank where four scared, weary conscripts witness the horrors of war through their telescopic sights – the wounded and dying, a donkey with its guts hanging out, a headless corpse still propped over a backgammon board in a coffee shop. The young men are dazed, clueless, no more than kids; “Could someone call my parents and tell them I’m okay?” says the gunner when their war-toughened officer asks if they have any questions. The officer himself is a fairly ambivalent figure, evil in some ways – they can’t use phosphorus bombs under international law, he explains to the boys, so all phosphorus bombs will henceforth be referred to as “flaming smoke” – but also humanised, revealing a beating heart beneath the macho exterior. He may be gruff, but he does eventually give instructions to call the gunner’s parents; “and call my Mum too,” he adds wearily.
In fact, the only bad guy isn’t Israeli at all but a Phalangist Arab, at which point you may wonder where truth ends and wishful thinking (or just propaganda) begins – but the film is still nail-biting, the young men are sharply delineated and the carnage is studded with surreal detail (at one point, a stark-naked woman runs through the battlefield wailing for her lost daughter). Israel’s taken a dark page in its past and mined it for drama, making films that work in themselves, beyond narrow politics. Why can’t we in Cyprus do the same with our dark past?
Hard to say – but festival-going does tend to raise that kind of question, given the richness and variety of movies being made nowadays: you get the sense that anything is possible. Even in a relatively small event like Thessaloniki, films seemed to come from everywhere – Canada and Ireland, Japan and Korea, Austria and the Philippines and Chile and Malaysia.
Huacho, limning a day in the lives of a poor Chilean family, was presented by first-time director Alejandro Fernandez Almendras, who explained that many in the cast of non-actors are people he’s known since childhood; the film itself is nicely-done if a bit one-dimensional, threaded with the secret tragedy of the new generation – the family’s videogame-loving young son – drifting away from its peasant forebears. Ho Yuhang, the cheerful Malaysian director of At the End of Daybreak, prefaced his screening with a warning: “Something unpleasant happens in the first three minutes!”. We gave a collective shiver, nursing the still-fresh memory of the savage Filipino drama Kinatay – winner of Best Director at Cannes – where a woman had been killed and dismembered by a gang of thugs. How much South-East Asian brutality could we handle? In the event, Ho’s warning was directed mostly at animal-lovers – our hero matter-of-factly pours boiling water on a rat caught in a trap – Malaysian customs having presumably disturbed Western audiences at previous festival screenings.
Kinatay was part of a focus on New Filipino Cinema, one of the Fest’s many sections. Huacho was in ‘Independence Days’, which included most of my own favourites – especially Hadewijch, a charged and mysterious tale of religious fervour (and the way it so often dovetails with vanity and “self-love”) from French director Bruno Dumont, with an astonishing performance from a totally unknown young actress named Julie Sokolowski. International Competition is of course the main section, but only on paper: one can make exciting discoveries – Ajami, an Israeli-German co-production set in the Palestinian city of Jaffa, won the coveted Golden Alexander – but most of the films are unknown quantities, making it even more of a stab in the dark than usual.
This year, Theo Angelopoulos – revered auteur and former President of the Festival – led the Jury that gave Ajami its award, putting his own imprimatur on the 50th-anniversary celebrations. There was even a Festival slogan – “Why Cinema Now?” – though it sounded oddly dissonant given the subdued, recession-hit mood that pervaded the occasion (as if to say ‘why bother with Cinema at a time like this?’). They even asked assorted movie types to answer this unanswerable question, their valiant responses projected onscreen while we waited for films to begin. “We need Cinema because we love imaginary worlds,” ventured Romanian director Adrian Sitaru. “Cinema is actually a religion that embraces all the beings of the four corners of the world,” enthused Brazilian cult figure José Mojica Marins, a.k.a. ‘Coffin Joe’. But the best response came from Japanese joker Takeshi Kitano – who, recognising the benign absurdity in “Why Cinema Now?”, countered with his own burning question: “Why sushi now?”.
Hopefully they also remembered to ask Werner Herzog – the Fest’s special guest, subject of a very extensive tribute screening his entire oeuvre (even the shorts he made as a 20-year-old). Herzog, for those who came in late, is the legendary German behind such demented mystical journeys as Aguirre Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo (though also two wondrous new films, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans) – and he not only accepted a Golden Alexander for his glittering career, but also gave a Masterclass where he shared stories and dropped weighty aphorisms. “I have fallen in love with the world,” he asserted, meanwhile advising film students to work as wardens in lunatic asylums or bouncers in sex-clubs in lieu of going to film school, the better (as he said in his heavy Bavarian accent) to “know the heart of Man”.
“There are no excuses anymore,” declared Mr. Herzog, addressing budding filmmakers but also perhaps the Cyprus film industry (and even those viewers who still shy away from ‘difficult’ cinema, preferring to watch mindless crap). “There is no lament anymore. No culture of complaint that I would accept.” His point was how simple it’s now become to follow your dream, make your movie, flesh out your vision – a point well-taken by Xavier Dolan, 19-year-old French-Canadian and writer-director-star of I Killed My Mother.
This wasn’t the best film at Thessaloniki, but it may have been the most inspiring: Dolan – a personable youngster who’s been acting since he was five – won awards at Cannes for this semi-autobiographical drama, a lively tale of a young, secretly gay man at odds with his mother. It’s not that she’s domineering; it’s just that she drives him crazy with her bad habits and coarse, selfish manner – so he rants and yells, and she retaliates with small acts of cruelty, and round and round they whirl in a love-hate relationship. Watching this flawed, heartfelt movie, it wasn’t the technique that one noticed, or the occasional references to The 400 Blows – it was Dolan’s hunger, his physical craving for the camera, his need for a film that could contain his (or his character’s) whole life. Festivals are a mixed bag, yet they make commercial cinema feel sterile, formulaic: the films aren’t always good, but they teem with Xavier Dolan-like excitement. Anything is possible.
