The Miami International Film Festival’s (Feb. 28 - March 9) lack of public screenings before 4 p.m. makes sense only after you’ve plopped bare feet onto the beach and felt the sun on your face--unusual sensations for movie people, several of whom were seen sporting freshly burned skin in the fest’s first half. On Day 4, Henry Fonda flaunted his own deep, dark tan in
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), magnificently restored from the Techniscope negative by veteran Paramount archivist Barry Allen and screened to a small but ecstatic audience at the Gusman, Miami’s gorgeous, ’20s-era movie palace.
If the MIFF never again conjured such cinephilic magic as
Once Upon a Time, we should blame the rare poetic genius of the late Sergio Leone and not the admirable efforts of the fest’s new director Patrick de Bokay, whose years as a Hollywood executive likely helped bring Demi Moore and her 25-member entourage to the Gusman for a screening of Michael Radford’s
Flawless--a film not quite truthfully named, but worthy for settling almost half of the old art-and-commerce equation. (Would you believe that the star plays a thief?)
Among de Bokay’s other important achievements is having kept the Miami fest’s focus on Ibero-American fare, represented in this 25th anniversary edition by films in both dramatic and documentary categories (e.g.,
The Zone in the former and
Stranded in the latter).
“The power of Miami is that it’s on U.S. soil, but it’s also multicultural,” says de Bokay, who’s multiculti himself--a Hungarian born and raised in Paris before moving to Los Angeles and now Miami.
“You can be a filmmaker from anywhere,” de Bokay says, “and your film has an audience here, in a real theater. So on the one hand, the purpose of [the MIFF] is to grow into a global entertainment event--following Sundance in January and Berlin in February--that showcases everything that can be done in this industry. Yet, on the other hand, the most important thing in Miami--the centerpiece of the festival--is the [awarded] competition. We try to find the best work of the moment and give it the proper recognition.”
At fest’s end, an Ibero-American jury split its award, recognizing both the Haitian/French
Eat, For This is My Body and the Mexican
Cochochi. The World Competition jury, which included actress Catalina Sandino Moreno (costar of Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming pair of Ché Guevara biopics), awarded its grand prize to the Polish
Tricks (
Sztuczki), with special mentions going to the Serbian
It’s Hard to Be Nice and the violent Israeli drama
Foul Gesture (
Tnu'a Meguna) (pictured above).
Speaking of
Foul Gesture (and in the spirit of full disclosure here): I served with Hungarian critic Géza Csákvári on the two-man FIPRESCI jury that considered the 15 films of the World Competition category and awarded the aforementioned Israeli movie, which plays like a political variation on the 1970s rash of urban American vigilante flicks--or like Spielberg’s
Munich at half the length and twice the guts.
Tight as a drum,
Foul Gesture is a movie in which every scene--nearly every line of dialogue, in fact--serves to support a handful of interwoven ideas about masculinity, parenthood, sexual frustration, downward mobility, writers’ block, terrorism, Jewishness, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to name a few. More broadly speaking, director Tzahi Grad’s insight into the stress-inducing details of modern life is acute enough to cause the nervous viewer some additional anxiety--as befits a movie that on some level means to point its middle finger at us. The film isn’t called
Foul Gesture for nothing.
Though one senses this festival is still getting its bearings on an operational level, the best films--including the jury-feted docs
Santa Fe Street (
Calle Santa Fé) and
Santiago--asserted the programmers’ taste for both significant subject matter and artful execution. And when, at some hours, there weren’t any films--good, bad, or ugly--to be seen at all, well, there was the beach.
Labels: Festivals
# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 3/19/2008 03:08:00 PM
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