International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg

Despite its snowballing growth as an industry hub for central European filmmaking, where directors seek buyers while producers parlay with potential partners, the ten-day Mannheim-Heidelberg Fest, nestled cozily in two neighboring cities along Germany’s Rhine, stakes its claim as a festival on the turf of the artist. For the Festival and its curating, this boils down to films that evince personal responsibility for their individual expressions. That one of the main awards is the R.W. Fassbinder Prize for narrative innovation – this year to Canadian Davor Marjanovic for My Father’s Angel – only stresses the Festival’s bid for idiomatic storytelling in an era of seemingly anonymous electronic frames and synthetic rhythms.

A forum for launching international co-productions with pre-arranged, one-on-one conferences, the Festival hosted 66 projects from 33 countries this year, bringing together 100 producers at 330 official meetings. Projects this year included 11 from the U.S. and Canada, including Mannheim veterans Peter Hall (Delinquent, 1995) and Derek Cianfrance (Brother Tied, 1998). That these two indies were invited back to pitch their new projects – a vampire film and a rock-and-roll love story – testifies to the Fest’s commitment to nourishing young talent.

Czech director Sasha Gideon’s striking second feature, The Return of the Idiot, was submitted as a project at the 1997 Mannheim Meetings and shown this year in the International Discoveries section. "A good film provokes or effects a personal change. Without that change a good film is just a nice film to me," explains Gedeon, whose stark, wintry scenes convey the dark emotions of the Dostoevsky novel that inspired his screenplay. Yet Gedeon’s idiot is no martyr; transplanted to Prague today, he fine-tunes his perception with a resilience that shocks his worst rivals even as he inspires them.

The most deserved prize at the festival went to Anu Kuivalainen from Finland, who won the Best Documentary Feature award for A Black Cat on the Snow. A woman released from prison four years after murdering her husband must now resume life with her young daughter. How does she explain? Quiet close-ups let us ponder the faces that begin as masks and disclose an introspection rarely found in the best of dramas.

This year’s Fest came full circle with its Mannheim opening gala, Farewell, Home Sweet Home! Written and directed by the formidable Otar Iosseliani, the film launched a retrospective of the auteur’s work since his exile from the Soviet Republic of Georgia to Paris in 1976 with the ban of his film Pastorale. In 1999, Farewell. . . embodies his legacy to young filmmakers – that curious, unpredictable flow of images through time, as magical and as real as life. "You don’t need words to experience my film," he told the audience. "Don’t worry about what language the people speak, don’t even read the subtitles. Just listen to what you see, and feel the music." With melancholy humor, tender beauty, and uproarious wit, Iosseliani set the tone for the Festival.

Hawaii International Film Festival by Augusta Palmer
OUTFEST by Jim Moran
International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam by Wellington Love
International Thessaloniki Film Festival by Ray Pride
International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg by Diane Sippl