FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

Thessaloniki International Film Festival

While a ten-day film festival with 173 films from 37 countries is a great diversion, so too is Thessaloniki. And the 39th International Thessaloniki Film Festival was enhanced by an immodestly favorable exchange rate, absurdly temperate weather, and of course, food and drink.

Most of the events at the festival – which drew a record 62,000 admissions this year – are within a few minutes walk of the waterfront. The compact scale allows a kind of mingling not possible at larger, glitz-and-market-driven fests. And the wonderful city at your fingertips won’t for a minute let you isolate yourself in a movie-mad, hype-rich, oxygen-deprived bubble. Yet Thessaloniki is a little-known gem among smaller festivals, drawing with admirable taste from the best of the year’s world festival circuit.

The International Competition, restricted to first- and second-time filmmakers, offers the Golden Alexander, a grand prize worth about $45,000, for best full-length film, which went to Yoichiro Takahashi’s unhurried teens-in-summer story, Fishes in August. (The lead’s sexual frustration sometimes matches one’s own in wanting the summer to turn to another season, another mood.) The Silver Alexander, worth about $27,000 prize was shared by Petr Zelenka’s ambitious slice of surrealism, Buttoners, from the Czech Republic, and The Flight of the Bee, a story of a poor teacher who digs a public latrine to embarrass a rich neighbor, by co-directors Jamshed Usmanov from Tajikistan and Korean Byoung Hun Min. Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple got a special mention, and a Special Artistic Achievement Award went to Kwangmo Lee’s affectingly written coming-of-age story, Spring in My Hometown. The Best Director nod went to Constantine Giannaris for From the Edge of the City. The inspiredly loopy God’s Got My Number, tracking the antics of a shy would-be womanizer by France’s Bruno Podalydes won the Heineken Audience Choice Award.

While the Festival, true to its regional roots, presents sections that focus on work from Greece and the Balkans, it has also gained a reputation for its extensive retrospectives, this year devoting one to the almost-unknown French documentarian Jean-Daniel Pollet. Others saluted included Nikos Koundouros, a major figure in the history of Greek cinema and an accomplished tragedian; the late Akira Kurosawa; Peter Greenaway (who was present for an art exhibition and to direct what he termed a "prop-opera"); and Ken Loach, whose features were presented along with his television work. Producers Good Machine were saluted with a six-film sidebar that included Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was... and the regional debut of Todd Solondz’s Happiness. Thessaloniki also continued its famous "3x3 series," in which a new film by an emerging director such as Spain’s Ventura Pons or France’s François Ozon is shown with two earlier examples of their work.

Among Greek entries, the languorous, lushly-lit Shores of Twilight, directed by NYU Film School graduate Efthimios Hatzis stood out, unlike Blackout, a much-awaited, almost three-hour widescreen contemporary epic that joined a batch of misguided, already-forgotten stabs at experi-minimalism that had theater doors swinging at audible intervals. Shores of Twilight is hypnotically paced, taking on the rhythm of island life and the timeless stories of dashed love shared by a quartet of travelers. Constantine Giannaris’ From the Edge of the City is a more jagged affair, with an invigorating title sequence showing his young Russian émigré characters robbing and rollerblading across city streets one dark night. Although his portrayal of their boozing, thieving and lusting in a dusty town outside Athens is often melodramatic, the setting is fresh.

The Festival’s non-competitive Official Selection included jury president Goran Paskaljevic’s immaculately crafted The Powder Keg and Bertolucci’s slippery Besieged, but the most eclectic and stimulating selection came under the heading of New Horizons, programmed by Dimitri Eipides, intended to "highlight the newest, most daring trends in independent film." Thessaloniki’s astute selections demonstrate that films that recur at festivals around the world are fest favorites because they’re good movies. Other popular entries included Dreamlife of Angels, Love is the Devil, Buffalo 66, Last Night, Broken Vessels, Claire Dolan, Dariush Mehrjui’s impassioned Leila, and Amos Kollek’s scaldingly acted Sue, as well as ¼, which Darren Aronofsky joked was now finally showing in the one country where the title required no translation.

Lucian Pintilie’s lustrous Romanian downer Terminus Paradis was a marvel of fluid camera and blocking in its story of a Bucharest ne’er-do-well (and soon-to-be draft evader) who falls in love with a pixie-ish waitress who’s a mix of Christina Ricci and Patricia Neal. Moments of visual majesty and troubling intimacy mingle with ease. Fatih Akin’s confident A Short, Sharp Shock, is a vigorous, imaginative polyglot cousin to the movies of Scorsese and Nick Gomez, bursting with cross-cultural energy and an eclectic ethnic mosaic of music.

The faux-antiquity of the central city, rebuilt several times after disasters including an annihilating 1917 fire, prompts thoughts of artifacts, as did the video traces in Hal Hartley’s Book of Life. Another artifict was Hungarian director György Fehér’s Passion, a retread of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, lumbering through daringly distended, obtuse takes that fulfill one of Fehér’s own great passions: "I have always wanted to make a film that looks like the last salvaged print of a long-lost film." Patrice Toye’s Rosie also sports a grimy look far different than the contemporary style of piss-elegant visuals in her elliptical telling of a lonely young girl’s fantasies. An anguished score by P.J.Harvey-collaborator John Parish matches Toye’s claustrophobic and neo-Fassbinder visuals, but the icing is a remarkably vivid performance by young Aranka Coppens as the dreamy young delinquent.



 
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