FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

International Film Festival of Mannheim-Heidelberg

Picture yourself with a newly completed first feature under your belt. You've lived with your film for years; now it's time for feedback. Who will look at your work, and what will they see? It's also time for payback. You need a distributor, buyers. A sales rep points you to Mannheim. The festival flies you and your producer to Germany and puts you both up for a week while your film is screened in competition no less than four times, twice in Mannheim and twice in Heidelberg. What will you have gained?

The International Film Festival of Mannheim-Heidelberg is as highly respected as it is long-standing. For 44 years it has built a reputation as a no-glitz fest that gets high on dialogue. Its erudite director, Dr. Michael Kötz, and his committed colleagues are on a singular mission: to put the word out on new and independent film artists.

In stalwart, no-nonsense Mannheim stands the brightly bannered Stadthaus, the hub of the festival. There at the city's center is the hall-turned-theater with adjacent press boxes, video monitors, and foyer-cafes where the "industry" wheels and deals, but not with names and faces, hits and stars.

A half-hour shuttle ride down the Neckar lies picturesque Heidelberg. A curious "Kinozelt" (film tent) rises up from the cobblestones of this old university city where the climate is young with vivacious, cinema-savvy students, in many ways an American filmmaker's best audience. It's one place where a director can count on a no-holds-barred reception, which is at the same time a highly articulate one, from a lay public. What used to be the Mannheim Film Week has expanded its turf and fattened its pocketbook in ways that count for the filmmaker - services, outreach, and financial support. Last year when Kötz extended the terrain of his fest to Heidelberg, he doubled not only the number of venues (and the audience, by 50%), but also the budget. With its significant program enlargement, this year's fest featured U.S. indies in three sections: in the Competition, where three out of 27 were American entries; in the "Independent Life" section with the Cassavetes retrospective; and in a special segment, "U.S. Independents," showcasing eight new talents. Although he is proudly steeped in the Euro-vision that "business does not come before art in author's cinema," Kötz has come to see distribution and sales as key concerns for indies. This season he initiated a "market service," delegating two specialists to guide some 30 buyers through the fest. Kötz himself aggressively interfaces between filmmakers and German tv buyers, for example, drawing on his experience as an art filmmaker for ZDF and on his reputation as critic, scholar, and consultant. Referrals are on his agenda, and he is flanked by four equally sharp cronies on his selection committee who are active in every corner of the media industry. To put money behind their words, the fest management offers a grant of DM20,000 to the distributor who ensures the theatrical release in Germany of one of the fest's prize-winning features.

An astute indie benefits differently from the twin cities of the festival. Whereas the hoots and hollers of Heidelberg's audience may spill over into a "prosting" session with the filmmakers, drawing in distributors and buyers who are there to conduct their litmus tests, Mannheim's more sober pros (critics, directors, producers, and programmers) nod gently as the lights come up. They save their "spiel" for the daily Midnight Talks, where the fest's artists and cine-specialists sit on panels facing their peers with both structured commentary and spontaneous debate. A session on American indie cinema went on for three hours as New Yorker Peter Hall (Delinquent) opposed USC grads Samer Daboul and Trevor Sands (Finding Interest) by upholding the Mannheimer stance of "authorean cinema" - the artist's individual and creative expression, over what was labeled the more American concept of "independent cinema" - the economic leverage Daboul and Sands would relinquish to Hollywood.

"There's no way my film wasn't discussed here," glowed Peter Hall, who'd signed a distribution deal the day he left for Germany and simply wanted to give Delinquent a good launch in the "U.S. Independents" side program. "I was in the newspapers daily, on Russian and German tv, and I was solicited by a Greek programmer. The staff here goes without sleep. They have a great heart and work incredibly well with each other. I've shown my movie to another culture, made business breakthroughs, and found inspiration, camaraderie, and an exchange of art."

Hall will help director Takaaki Watanabe market his Alice Sanctuary in the West. The film won the fest's award from the FIPRESCI jury, one of the biggest international organizations of critics. Alice Sanctuary is a stunning and psychologically adept visual poem about a teenager whose unconditional love both breeds and resists violence in others.

American Neil Abramson found his invitation to Mannheim at the Berlin Market. "You can't get more recognition at a smaller festival," he claims. Not only was Without Air, his first feature, screened six times in Mannheim and Heidelberg, after which he was approached by distributors from two different countries in two days, but he returned to Los Angeles with a DM10,000 award as the "Most Promising Newcomer" at the festival. His bluesy, edgy portrait of a woman whose only emotional sustenance is her singing kicked up the kind of self-dialogue in the spectator that the festival pursues with a vengeance. Evoking Janis Joplin in its casting, performance, "Down-on-Me" mise en scene and subjective camera style, the film often provoked, depressed, and even irritated viewers.

"Mannheim has always been a festival of directors - for them to gain the experience of presenting and discussing their work," maintains Dr. Kötz. It's exactly this commitment that initiated Toronto's Michael Bockner into the festival circuit with his handsomely mounted Johnny Shortwave, about a guerrilla radio commentator who jams government signals. A didactic dystopia of the future that is now, but even more so a meditation on our relation to the charismatic voice, Bockner's film, perhaps more than any at the festival, highlighted the power of dialogue. "My film's actually about the people who travel through Johnny's world - how they affect him and how he affects them," claims the director. "I really enjoyed this festival because there's very little pretension here. There's an equality among all the filmmakers, and between the filmmakers and the audience, so you can talk to anyone, and you should."



 
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