Alpe Adria Film Festival

Once an important and prosperous port city for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Trieste is today an economically and culturally sleepy border city in Northeastern Italy, populated predominantly by a mix of Yugoslavians and Italians. What better place, then, to hold a festival dedicated since its inception ten years ago to East European cinema? "We came about strictly to foster and highlight films and talent from a part of the world not many people in this country knew about or had access to," says Alpe Adria Artistic Director Annamaria Percavassi.

Alpe Adria is a small but ambitious festival. Despite the fact that festival organizers have little money for extensive publicity – 1999 marks the first year the Municipality of Trieste has contributed any funds – the theatre-café in which the festival is held was packed every night with Triestines hungry for something other than the standard, dubbed, Hollywood fare that plays in most of the city’s cinemas.

Each year the festival has a distinct theme though, for political reasons, this year’s theme was more or less a continuation of 1998’s. Last year, Alpe Adria presented a retrospective of films from the Yugoslavian Black Wave, a name given to the films and filmmakers of the ’60s and ’70s banned by the government for their experimental and politically critical work. However, the Croatian Cultural Ministry refused to participate when they found out their films would be shown alongside Serbian works.

This time, with only one Serbian film at the festival (Goran Paskaljevic’s The Powder Keg, which has been a European festival staple since its premiere at Venice last year, and will be released by Paramount Classics in the U.S. in August), the Croatian government had little to complain about. The main retrospective, "Waves of the Other Shore," highlighted Croatian features, shorts and animated films from the ’50s and ’60s, alongside smaller retrospectives of Bosno-Hercegovine and Montenegran films.

While Yugoslavia, like most countries in the world, wasn’t producing works of incredibly high artisitic merit in that era, many of the films were nonetheless more than just interesting historical footnotes. Particularly the animated shorts which seemed years ahead of their Western counterparts, stylistically as well as thematically. The competition films, however, are not restricted to Eastern Europe, and for a festival this size, Alpe Adria has a surprisingly strong selection. Ten feature films competed for the 10 million lire (approximately $6,000) first prize, and 36 shorts competed for the smaller prize of 3 million lire (approximately $3,000). The two strongest features – Croatian director Snjezana Tribuson’s debut Melita Dzanger’s Three Men and Austrian filmmaker Florian Flicker’s Suzie Washington — were exceptional films in their own right. Melita, winner of numerous awards in Croatia, is a tender, humorous and very human story about a shy young woman’s search for love. Mixing Latin American soap operas (which are wildly popular in Croatia) with solid writing, and a faultless comic timing, the film has drawn many comparisons to the socio-realist films that came out of Czechoslovakia during the ’70s. Suzie Washington, starring an enormously gifted Birgit Doll, follows the story of a Georgian (as in ex-Soviet) woman, Nana Iaschwili, and her attempt to emigrate illegally to the United States after she has been detained in Vienna for having a falsified visa. With barely a single scene depicting physical violence, Flicker creates a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere, playing off Nana’s desperation and fear that she will be discovered and returned to her warring homeland against images of wealthy and vacationing Austrians, few of whom are willing to risk their comfort to help her escape.

Other feature films included FireRider by German director Nina Grosse, a confident and affecting depiction of the life of 18th century poet Friedrich Holderlin; The World Upside Down by Rolando Colla (Switzerland); Killer by Darezan Omirbaev (Kazachistan); The Day of the Full Moon by Karen Sachnarazov (Russia); and Buttoners, a black comedy by Czech director Petr Zelenka, who won a Tiger award for the film last year in Rotterdam.

The prize went to The History of Cinema in Popielawach, by Jan Jakub Kolski, a bittersweet tribute to the passion that is cinema, and its fictionalized birth in the small town of Popielawach, Poland. Special Mention went to Hungarian director Gyorgy Feher’s Passion, a particularly passionless remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. In the shorts category, the winner was A Perfect Accent by Nicola Sornaga, about an Italian immigrant’s nostalgia for home, with Swiss directors Frederic Choffat and Andrea Staka receiving Honorable Mentions for A Nedjad and Hotel Belgrade, respectively.

Alpe Adria’s jury is yet another feature which sets the festival apart – the festival’s juries are always comprised solely of film students from the University of Trieste. "They’re not conditioned," says Percavassi when speaking about the students’ openness and spontaneity. "They have no interests or connections with any groups, directors, producers, like the juries at all the big festivals." While it’s arguable whether academia is the logical place to turn to avoid the pitfalls of a biased jury, or whether the students’ age and lack of life experience might impede them from understanding or appreciating certain films, Percavassi insists that "they can and do give a sense of where the cinema is going, where it should go."

Other highlights included student films from Poland’s famous Lodz Film School, including the student work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, Roman Polanski and Andrzej Wajda among others; over 50 films by Czech filmmakers, covering as many years; and a selection of experimental videos from the ex-Communist block countries. And the festival program, which at three pounds has to be the heaviest, most densely packed catalogue around, featuring not only biographies and film summaries, but essays on such esoteric topics as "Pornography as Political Opposition" and "A State With a Decomposed Backbone."

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