Retrospectives also came close to stealing the thunder in Torino at the prestigious but embattled Festival Internazionale Giovanni, run by the highly-respected international curator Alberto Barbera. An orgy of Brazilian cinema from the 1960s and '70s captivated a swath of the city's small population and a fair whack of international delegates as well. A sidebar on recent American independent documentary work, awarded a special mention from the attending FIPRESCI jury, also packed them in.

Torino, the royal seat of the House of Piedmont - Italy's last (and only) kings - is suitably grandiose. Vast arcades and immense stone palaces line downtown streets filled with extremely expensive fashions and mouth-watering sweeties. While the language and laws are Italian, the culture is Burgundian, a mixture of French and Italian mannerisms quite distinct from nearby Milan or the Ligurian coast. This cultural marriage extends to film appreciation: the Torinese receive the festival films with a kind of reserved ebullience and with expansive intellectual debate. The lobbies are perpetually overflowing with smoke-filled arguments about the merits of various films.

These debates are often prompted by Barbera's unusual Competition selections. With films drawn from a wide range of cinematic production but always with an eye to a coherent curatorial strategy, this festival always has something new to say about the state of world cinema. There is much overlap with Eipides' New Horizons program: the two men are friends, share similar taste and often screen films together in an unusually collegial spirit.

Competition prizes this year more or less matched audience sentiments. The Grand Prize was awarded to Ning Ying's festival friendly On the Beat, a keenly observed portrait of the day-to-day life of a Beijing cop. Special Jury Prizes went to two problematic Torino discoveries: Little Sister is an intriguing and beautifully constructed Dutch tale of reconstructed incest and sibling brutality compromised - rather severely for this critic - by its outdated video diary form. With its politically ripe references and savvy literary structure, Slovak Martin Sulic's The Garden would be a masterpiece of the escape-to-nature variety were it not for his insistent misogyny, here embodied in a virgin/whore duality of monstrous stupidity. FIPRESCI awarded an eyebrow-raiser to I Pugili, a decidedly thin look into the Italian boxing scene. (To be fair, most of the films in Competition were ineligible for the prize because of their participation in previous events.)

It was generally acknowledged that the Competition had a tough year. Barbera concurs: "There have been many changes in strategies for the promotion of film and the relationships between festivals in recent years. On the [one] hand, there are fewer and fewer good films, so all festivals are after the same movies. On the other hand, the competition between festivals is becoming tougher. Festivals like Berlin are demanding premieres of all films they show, but this is dangerous; they cannot assure that a premiere in a sidebar wil receive adequate international promotion. We, with Thessaloniki, Rotterdam, London, Götteborg and a few others, have become a kind of second circuit, offering reliable national press coverage and some smaller commercial possibilities. Producers are now being forced to choose one or the other.

"Because of this, it is more and more difficult to guarantee a high level for the Competition. So we are compensating with director spotlights and special programs. This is exactly the reason we devoted a special section to U.S. documentaries."

An interesting and strong collection of work, it included ten titles, stretching from older work like Hoop Dreams, Crumb and Theremin to European premieres of Nick Broomfield's newest exposé of a naughty female, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam and Mark Rappaport's haunting reconstruction, From the Journals of Jean Seberg.

According to Barbera, "In Italy, documentaries are mostly neglected, not even showing that much on tv. Despite our greatest filmmakers having worked in the form, the documentary has been forgotten here. So this is an attempt to compensate. It was a risk, a bet; but we are very pleased with the turnout and hope this establishes American documentaries as an emerging genre here."

Such tenacity and creative reinvention are rapidly becoming the norm for directors of medium-sized festivals. Yes, agrees Barbera, but "we must not abandon our main goal: giving relevance to `found' or `discovered' cinema and to help emerging directors. This was our objective from the beginning and what the public likes."

International Thessaloniki Film Festival
Festival Internazionale Giovanni
Toronto International Film Festival
Montreal World Film Festival
V'iennale