54th Cannes International Film Festival 2001
9.-20. May 2001

Awards      Cannes Sidebar Notebook

Cannes 2001
Ron Holloway, Interfilm, 12 June 2001

Introduction
Two events made the 54th Festival International du Film (9-20 May 2001) particularly memorable. The first was the news that, after 22 years as délégué général, Gilles Jacob stepped up to become Président while handing down the reins to Thierry Frémaux, the latter now divides his time between Cannes and duties as head of the Institute Lumière in Lyons. The other was the presence on the Croisette of seven previous Palme d’Or directors: Francis Ford Coppola (>The Conversation<, 1974, and >Apocalypse Now<, 1979), Ermanno Olmi (>The Tree of Wooden Clogs<, 1978), Shohei Imamura (>The Ballad of Narayama<, 1983, and >The Eel<, 1997), David Lynch (>Wild at Heart<, 1990), Joel and Ethan Coen (>Barton Fink<, 1991), and Abbas Kiarostami (>The Taste of Cherries<, 1997). One might add, too, that over the past quarter century each of their eight award-winning films helped considerably to set the tone and style of the world’s most revered film festival.

Apocalypse Now Redux
In the case of >Apocalypse Now< - aka >Apocalypse Now Redux<, to denote a new version of an old film - Francis Ford Coppola returned to Cannes with the completed version of his work-in-progress presented here 22 years ago. No less than 53 minutes were added to the re-edited 203-minute version, in addition to a re-mastered Technicolor transfer and a re-mastered soundtrack. Further, Coppola was able to enlist the aid of two former collaborators, cameraman Vittorio Storaro and editor Walter Murch, to assist him on the director’s cut of a classic that now ranks with Orson Welles’s >Citizen Kane< as one of the world’s legendary film productions. When the film is “re-released,” cineastes will relish the added French plantation sequence, the inserted rescue of stranded Playmates by a patrol boat crew “for favors received,” and the scraping of the animal sacrifice scene in the original (one of several endings Coppola could choose from).

Cannes natives and visitors were treated to another first in festival history: a gratis open-air screening of >Apocalypse Now Redux< on the harbor-front next to the Palais des Festivals, viewed by hundreds under balmy weather conditions. The occasion was made possible when the set for Baz Luhrmann’s >Moulin Rouge< (Australia) came down shortly after its opening night presentation. Further, since Coppola’s film had already run out-of-competition on a soldout Friday evening, the additional outdoor screening gave the general public a welcomed chance to view a festival classic. “We plan to offer more free public screenings in the future,” confirmed Thierry Frémaux in an interview with this reporter.

Palme d’Or: Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room
This was not the first time that the International Jury and the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Jury agreed on the same film for top honors at Cannes. Nonetheless, when the presidents of both juries - Liv Ullmann for the International Jury, Derek Malcolm for the FIPRESCI Jury - admitted to the same split decision, each favoring Nanni Moretti’s >La stanza degli figlio (The Son’s Room)< (Italy) over Michael Hanneke’s >La pianiste (The Piano Teacher)< (Austria/France) for the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Award, this did make news and triggered some discussion on whether the best film won. Further, Hanneke’s >The Piano Teacher< received not only the runnerup Grand Prix, but Isabelle Huppert in the title role was also awarded Best Actress (the only unanimous decision of the jury) together with Benoît Magimel as Best Actor. And Derek Malcolm, president of the FIPRESCI Jury, confirmed that only one vote separated >The Son’s Room< from >The Piano Teacher<.

Nanni Moretti is no stranger to the Cannes competition. Nearly a quarter-century ago, his tragicomedy >Ecce Bombo< (1978) introduced the writer-director-actor in the persona of a 24-year-old student revolutionary trying to separate his political beliefs from his private phobias - and the Italian auteur has been doing it ever since in a string of semi-autobiographical cult films under his Sacher Film trademark (named for his favorite Viennese chocolate cake). >Caro diario< (1993), awarded Best Director at the 1994 Cannes festival, is a free-wheeling, first-person-narrative account of his phobias that ends on a personal note: in the “On My Vespa” episode we follow Moretti in a seemingly endless camera-take as he cruises the streets of Rome - until he reaches the spot where Pasolini was murdered. In >Aprile< (1998), the sequel to >Dear Diary<, he’s a would-be documentarist who can’t separate his private life (he’s the father of a new-born son) from a political commitment to speak out against the wave of rightist support for Silvio Berlusconi. The documentary is finally shelved for lack of anything relevant and up-to-date to say.

Often cited as a “low-key Woody Allen,” nowhere is this tag more appropriate than in >The Son’s Room<. Nanni Moretti plays a psychoanalyst in the small town of Ancona on the Adriatic coast, a provincial nest where the family is the center of the world and where a death in the family tests the power of love. “My wish was to show how sadness often divides people who love one another,” said Moretti in an interview. Following the unexpected death of his teenaged son on a diving excursion with friends, Giovanni (Moretti) is unable to help his patients unlock their emotional psychoses, much less resolve his own feelings of remorse and blame for failing to spend that tragic Sunday with his son instead of responding to an emergency call. The same bitter feeling of loss and emptiness is felt by his wife Paola (Laura Morante, a standout also in >Bianca<, 1984, arguably Moretti’s best film), who can no longer keep her mind on publishing art books, and their teenaged daughter, who unleashes her anger on the school basketball court. The spiral of life is about to spin completely out of control when a warm love letter for the son arrives from a girl he once met briefly during a camping outing. Interest in the girl is awakened, the mother makes a phone call, and one day the girl joins the shattered family circle to tell her story.

True, Nanni Moretti walks a thin line between solace and sentiment in >The Son’s Room<, but he does so with a sure hand for those profound moments of painful family separation. When the sister asks that the lid of the coffin be lifted again so that she can see, and touch, her brother for the last time, the simplicity of the scene cuts to the bone and confirms Moretti as a director with an intuitive sense for family tragedy. Let it be said, too, that if you strip away the film’s superficial components, you are confronted with a poignant, sometimes heart-rending, modern-dress variation on the passion play. Add to this the news that Moretti himself recently recovered from a lingering illness, plus the fact that >The Son’s Room< has been a commercial hit since its release in Italy last March, and you have a Palm winner well on its way to becoming a box office winner the world over too.

Grand Prix: Michael Hanneke’s The Piano Teacher
Michael Haneke’s >La pianiste (The Piano Teacher)<, is adapted from a novel by Austrian writer-dramatist Elfriede Jelinek, whose style of writing is pegged to linguistic subtleties. Asked why he had picked up an antiquated screenplay written a decade ago, then updated it with further changes to fit his stylistic vision, Haneke replied: “Firstly, because someone suggested it. Secondly, because of the story’s extremely complex observations about society that go beyond private interrelationship. And, thirdly, because there are three great roles.” A fourth reason could also be added: the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the title role. “In my opinion she’s the best actress I know in Europe, if not the entire world. On the one hand, she has the sensitivity and ability to show suffering. On the other, she can show the character’s cold-bloodedness and looks good at the same time.”

Hanneke is best remembered at Cannes for driving hypersenitive viewers from their seats when his psychodrama >Funny Games< (1997) was presented in 1997 the competition. A weird tale about a pair of murderous psychopaths toying with their victims before killing them, it was followed a year later with the more accessible >Code inconnu (Code Unknown)<. On the surface a chronicle about the socially alienated and the psychologically disturbed peopling the streets and metros of Paris, >Code Unknown< offers a harsh portrait of urban ethics found in most European capitals. He wanted the audience to feel the coldness of the consumer society, the incapacity to social classes to intercommunicate, the fears emanating from xenophobia and prejudice, the Babylonian confusion of languages, and the media’s clichés about the “have’s” and the “have not’s.”

Discovered for Cannes by Pierre-Henri Deleau, Michael Haneke formulated his theories on the modern phenomenon of “glaciation” in a trilogy of psychological studies presented in the Directors Fortnight. In these films he focused on people who had lost both the ability, even the desire, to communicate. Furthermore, he feels that these emotionally disturbed individuals are representative of a morally ruptured society. In >The Seventh Continent< (1989) deranged parents lock themselves into their apartment, poison their daughter, and then commit a double suicide. In >Benny’s Video< (1992), self-centered middle-class parents attempt to cover up a senseless murder committed by their lonely teenaged son, who is living a stunted childhood with his camrecorder and has completely lost touch with reality. In >71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance< (1994) an emotionally disturbed university student opens fire with a gun in a bank and randomly killed a number of people he doesn’t even know.

In >The Piano Teacher< Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), a middle-aged teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, is living an hermetic, love-hate existence with a tyrannical mother (Annie Giradot) in which there is no room for men, heightened by the commitment of her father to an insane asylum. Worse, her sex life has been reduced to voyeurism and masochistic diversions - that is, until Walter Klemmer (Benoît Magimel), one of her young pupils into ice-hockey as well as music, decides to seduce her. Attracted yet repelled by his advances, Erika sinks deeper into her self-imposed malaise of selfish spite and shameless mortification until she loses completely control of herself.

“Victims interest me more than perpetrators,” says Michael Haneke. “Women are more interesting because they’re further down the line in the pecking order. Men bore me.” As for why he adapted a novel by Austrian writer-dramatist Elfriede Jelinek, whose style of writing is pegged to linguistic subtleties, he admitted to a desire to return to Vienna because he enjoys the psychological give-and-take in the German language. Thus, key supporting roles are played by prominent German stage-and-screen actors (Udo Samel, Susanne Lothar, the latter seen in >Funny Games<). All the same, The Piano Teacher is a festival anomaly: a Viennese story shot in French with the German roles dubbed. Is this the version that will be released in Austria?

The Balkans: Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land
Awarded Best Screenplay, Danis Tanovic’s >No Man’s Land< is a tale about the insanity of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. When the Bosnian Ciki (Branko Djuric) and the Serb Nino (Rene Bitorajac), two enemy soldiers, get stranded between the lines in the summer of 1993 and find they have little reason to continue the conflict on personal grounds, they have to find a way out of their grotesque quandary. Along comes a friendly UN soldier (Georges Siatidis), who likewise gets pulled into the mess despite orders not to get involved. Before long, the incident explodes into an international news event - Balkan-style, comic and bitter at the same time. After all the diplomatic cards are played, the outcome is still a disaster: the dead transported from the scene in a helicopter, one Bosnian soldier left behind, lying atop a mine that cannot be defused - like a crucified Christ.

One might argue that >No Man’s Land<, a Belgian-French-Italian-British-Slovenian coproduction, is coming a decade too late. However, the Bosnian writer-director has paid his dues in this respect. Danis Tanovic belongs to the same SAGA (Sarajevo Group of Authors) collective, whose wartime documentation during the siege of Sarajevo was cited and praised at several international film festivals. And Cannes veterans well remember a hard-hitting omnibus film programmed by Pierre-Henri Deleau at the 1994 Directors’ Fortnight: >MGM - Man, God, Monster<, in which each of the three episodes by four filmmakers focused on events from a perspective inside the sieged city. The picture was dark, depressing, debilitating.
Another year passed, the war ended, and some enterprising pseudo-aficionados sensed their opportunity. Spanish director Gerardo Herrero’s >Territorio Comanche<, a competition entry at the 1997 Berlinale, was more of a laugh parade about “dangers to journalists” than about the siege itself. British director Michael Winterbottom’s >Welcome to Sarajevo<, a competition entry at the 1997 Cannes festival, came across as a speculative rehash of well-known TV documentation that sugar-coated the plight of the suffering.
Far better, so far as taking the pulse of a besieged city was concerned, was Bosnian director Ademir Kenovic’s >The Perfect Circle<, the opening night presentation at the 1997 Directors’ Fortnight. Penned by poet-dramatist-screenwriter Abdullah Sidran (he scripted for a young Emir Kusturica >Do You Remember Dolly Bell?<, awarded the Opera Prima Prize at Venice in 1981, followed by >Father’s Away on a Business Trip<, awarded the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1985), >The Perfect Circle< interpreted the meandering thoughts and stubborn determination of a resolute alcoholic to stay put despite all - and to offer needed shelter to two orphaned boys from a nearby village.

When I visited the 2nd Sarajevo festival in the fall of 1996, the siege had just ended and >The Perfect Circle< was in postproduction. Also, the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the Felix European Film Awards had been given to the SAGA Group under the aegis of Ademir Kenovic. The recognition contrasted with a crass case of current government corruption. By hook or by crook, a veteran septuagenarian director from Zagreb had obtained a funding grant of $1 million from certain key parliamentary members in the Bosnia-Hercegovina federation to make a film titled Sarajevo that would feature international stars in the cast. The film was never made and the money disappeared, while the SAGA Group had to scrape together modest funding for a “black book” titled Sarajevo in War, 1992-1995, Filmography, published in 1998.
Listed in this vital Sarajevo in War filmography are several shorts, documentaries, and videos made with the help of writer-director Danis Tanovic, who was responsible for the Bosnian army’s film archive. He himself filmed over 300 hours of footage shot on the front lines, material that was used in news reports broadcast around the world. Together with Dino Mustafic, Tanovic wrote and directed >My Mother the Sehit< (1992), a poignant 12-minute short produced for SAGA by Ademir Kenovic and Ismet Arnautalic. The story of a boy whose mother was killed in the early stages of the war, he brings a rose from her garden to place on her grave - only to find that it has mysteriously disappeared upon his return. In the equally impressive >Portrait of the Artist in the War< (1994), a 19-minute documentary, Tanovic explores how indifference gradually gives way to commitment in an artist’s approach to the ongoing war.

The siege over, Danis Tanovic transferred his filmmaking base to Belgium while still maintaining ties and allegiance to Bosnia. His documentary >L’Aube (Dawn)< (1997), awarded several prizes at international festivals, depicts the anxiety of a blind man who waits as a helpless refugee for his family to join him. And his documentary >Ça ira< (1999), about life and times in present-day Bosnia, also received multiple festival awards. Now comes No Man’s Land, a debut feature film set in 1993 at the height of the Bosnian war, and here again one wonders how this debut feature film could get made at all. As the story goes, Tanovic had the good fortune to attend the São Paulo festival, where he posed the idea of a tragicomedy about his war experiences to festival guests.
 “We found the money in six months,” said Tanovic at his Cannes press conference. “Thanks to the screenplay, which was liked a lot.” Asked whether >No Man’s Land< was based on personal experiences, he responded: “Of course, my war experience is very present, but this is a story, a fiction film, a film that I thought up. It’s about my thoughts and my view on everything that happened to us.”

To say more might lessen the reader’s own viewing experience of the film. Suffice it to say that this is the story of two enemy soldiers - a Serb and a Bosnian, both hardy fellows who don’t really know how and why they got into this mess - stranded between the front lines in the summer of 1993. When Danis Tanovic, together with his actors and his production team, took the stage following the premiere presentation of >No Man’s Land< in the Grand Théâtre Lumière at Cannes, they were greeted with a standing ovation that lasted ten minutes. Sales for the “Cannes discovery” - cited in the press as a low-budget Belgian-French-British-Italian-Slovenian coproduction - followed swiftly.
This said, you can well imagine the kind of greeting Danis Tanovic will receive when >No Man’s Land< opens the Seventh Sarajevo Film Festival on August 17th in the 2,500-seat Open Air Cinema at the Obala Art Center.

David Lynch and the Coen Brothers
David Lynch and Joel Coen shared Best Director Award for a pair of films anchored in Hollywood traditions yet far enough away from current formulas to challenge even the most astute critic and historian as to depth and meaning. Lynch has called >Mulholland Drive< (referring to a curving highway running along the edge of Hollywood Hills) “a love story in the city of dreams” - and takes it as a compliment when the film is compared with Nathaniel West’s >The Day of the Locust< (published in 1939, when he was working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and filmed by John Schlesinger in 1975). In fact, the opening scene of the car accident on >Mulholland Drive< hints of West’s own death at 36 in a car crash in 1940, just as the writer was about to gain fame for his black comedies and satirical indictment of the American Way of Life.
Originally, >Mulholland Drive< was conceived as a sequel to Lynch’s successful >Twin Peaks< TV series (1992) - later made into >Fire Walk with Me<, the movie version presented at the 1994 Cannes festival - but when the pilot was rejected by ABC, it proved to be a rich find for a scary, bizarre, sensuous exploration of the imaginary world of dreams and nightmares in the Hollywood tinsel factory. After the crash on >Mulholland Drive<, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), an amnesiac brunette, is taken in Betty (Naomi Watts), a good-hearted blonde new to Hollywood who’s set on resolving the amnesia dilemma. Later, Rita morphoses into Camilla and Betty into Diane, their roles changing and interchanging much as dreams give way to nightmares without any rational reason. Try to make sense out of >Mulholland Drive<, and you get lost in the labyrinth midway through the film. Lean back in your seat to relax, and you will be treated to some finely rendered acting scenes by the pair, supported by former Hollywood dancer Anne Miller as Coco Lenoix in a sparkling cameo.

As for Joel Coen’s >The Man Who Wasn’t There<, scripted with brother Ethan, the Hollywood reference here is to writer James M. Cain (1892-1977), one of the masters of the hard-boiled detective story whose film noir adaptations rank among the best in the Hollywood genre. Cain, a master at weaving a web of intrigue from the subjective viewpoint of the murderer or the victim, provided the plots for three film noir classics of the 1940s: Billy Wilder’s >Double Indemnity< (written 1934, filmed 1944), Tay Garnett’s >The Postman Always Rings Twice< (written 1936, filmed 1946), and Michael Curtiz’s >Mildred Pierce< (written 1941, filmed 1945). Contrary to intricate detective stories by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain preferred a tight narrative that linked the crime unmistakingly to a romantic triangle with sexual obsession as the key motivation. Thus, it was no wonder that European directors got their hands on his first novel long before Hollywood did: Pierre Chenal adapted >The Postman Always Rings Twice< to the screen first as >Le Denier Tournant (The Last Shift)< (France, 1939), followed by Luchino Visconti’s neorealist >Ossessione< (Italy, 1942).

The Cain giveaway in the Coens’ >The Man Who Wasn’t There< is not the black-and-white homage to the film noir tradition so much as the blackmail letter written by the husband to the adulterer that both confirms his suspicions and paves the way for the chain-reaction of murder and homicide. Also, the setting is a barber-shop in a sleepy hamlet in northern California, a stopover akin to the roadside cafe in >The Postman Always Rings Twice<. When Ed (Billy Bob Thornton), a chain-smoking barber, bares his thoughts in the opening sequence to tell us how dull his life is, he starts the ball rolling by succumbing to the ploy of a passing conman to invest in a dry-cleaning scam. This leads to the anonymous blackmail letter, the accidental killing of the adulterer, the suicide of his wife sentenced to death for the killing, and so on until the final twist at the end of the prolonged, yet spellbinding narrative.

Masters I: Ermanno Olmi’s The Profession of Arms
As befits a master filmmaker - indeed, at 69, the last of the great Italian postwar masters - Ermanno Olmi is reluctant to give interviews. To get him to say much about why he, a humanist director, would attempt to make a film about >Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms)< is almost a waste of time. He prefers to let his films speak for themselves. A shy, self-effacing man, it’s always been that way with Olmi. He was particularly sparse on words when awarded the Palme d’Or at the 1978 Cannes festival for >The Tree of Wooden Clogs<, also when he received the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice festival for >The Legend of a Holy Drinker<. And there hasn’t been a published interview with Olmi in nearly a decade.

One reason for Olmi’s reticence is the embarrassment of having to answer nagging questions about the inspiration for his films and the meaning behind their odd-sounding titles. Or why nearly five years of inactivity lay between the Cannes premieres of >The Tree of Wooden Clogs< (1978) and >Cammina Cammina< (1983), then another four years until >Long Live the Lady< (1987) won the Silver Lion at Venice - to be followed (oddly enough) by only a year when >The Legend of the Holy Drinker< (1988) won the Golden Lion. During these absences, though seldom publicized, he had been wrestling with a long and sometimes paralyzing illness.

At the 1994 Venice festival, on the occasion of the premiere of his >Genesis: Creation and Flood<, I had the good fortune to interview Olmi with other journalists - but on his conditions. The site for the meeting was the Ai Frati working-man’s restaurant on the pier of Murano island, a few steps down from the legendary glass-blowing factory. It was about as far away from the pomp of the Lido as one can get and still be in Venice. Take a chair in our midst, he queried why we had bothered to come at all: “You know my answers as well as your questions, so what’s the sense of it?”

Instead, he talked in rounded phrases and mused in his Lombardy dialect about his profession, about how he seldom needed to go far from home to film a story that was “part of me,” about how the only measure of a film’s importance is the common denominator: man. >Genesis<, which he has just filmed, is, in other words, “about us,” not a homage to a distant deity in some picture-book. At a neighboring table sat Loredana Detto, Olmi’s wife, taking it all in with the same wistful charm that captured the heart of the youth Domenica in >Il Posto< (1961), the director’s most personal film. The story of a Lombard peasant boy applying for an available office job in a large Milan company, and falling shyly in love with the young secretary, Magali/Loredana, the core of the film experience is a reflection on work drawn from Olmi’s own recollections as an 18-year-old applying for a job at the Edisonvolta company.

Olmi’s masterpiece, >The Tree of Wooden Clogs<, is also autobiographical in the sense that it is drawn from stories about country people and family life told to him by his grandfather. When it was selected for the 1978 Cannes festival by Gilles Jacob, then the newly appointed délégué général, the decision was considered a risky one - simply because this abridged version of the three-hour, three-part TV series about peasants and their will to survive in late 19th-century Lombard had to be projected in the Palais des Festivals in quadrangle-compressed TV format (at that time an exception to festival protocol).

Just as risky was the decision to present >Cammina Cammina< out-of-competition at the in 1983 Cannes festival. A rustic, folkloric, simplistic retelling of the story of the Magi, it came across to some as naive religious sentiment - to Olmi defenders, however, as a poetic, colorful, vibrant hymn to the sheer beauty of Lombard pageantry. Much the same can be said about >The Profession of Arms<, the third film in Ermanno Olmi’s historical “Lombard triptych,” this one about the art of making war at a turning point in medieval history. Filmed on location in Bulgaria with Italian and Bulgarian actors, >The Profession of Arms< comes across again as an eye-filling panorama of dress, apparel, armor, weapons, banners, and all the courtly traditions of European statecraft - indeed, as a tapestry of art and history as the Dark Ages faded into the flush of the Renaissance. Set in Lombard in 1520 , this was the era of Erasmus and Machiavelli, of Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas More, of the Medicis in Florence and the Papacy in Rome, of new nations carved from feudal fiefs.

According to Ermanno Olmi, it was also a time when “a code of honor still characterized the noble art of warfare.” Giovanni de Medici (Hristo Zivkov), a fringe member of the Medici family, was already a living legend at twenty. Known in the ranks of mercenary commanders as a great condottiere, his services were needed in a war waged between the Spanish and Papal armies. When he was brought down on the field by a cannonball, instead of dying bravely in hand-to-hand combat, his death marked a new era in which, says Olmi, “our wars of machines and technology make ‘progress’ ever more impersonal and deadly - a ‘progress’ that has not guaranteed man’s human, moral, and civil growth.”

Afghan Enigma: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Road to Kandahar
Query Mohsen Makhmalbaf as to why he would want to cross the border from Iran to Afghanistan to make >Safar é Gandehar< (The Road to Kandahar, aka Kandahar), and he’ll cloak his answer in an treatise on why “The Buddha Was Not Demolished in Afghanistan - It Collapsed Out of Shame,” his documentation that accompanied the film’s screening in Cannes. In other words, Mohsen Makhmalbaf wants to make sure the viewer doesn’t miss the point when viewing his fiction-documentary about hunger, starvation, and death in today’s Afghanistan. For >Kandahar< is hardly a film about Iran, although some 250 years ago Afghanistan did belong to the then Persian empire, nor is it set in the ancient Afghan city of Kandahar just across the border. Rather, it was researched and shot in Afghan refugee camps scattered along the Iran-Afghan border.

Mohsen’s lengthy treatise is just as important as the film itself. Indeed, it makes obligatory reading to absorb the mountain of detailed information presented in >The Road to Kandahar<. Thus the fictional story serves as a frame to set the stage for the real-life drama, while at the same time evoking sympathy for the plight of Afghan refugees living abroad. Nafas (Niloufar Pazira), a young Afghan journalist who has taken refuge in Canada during the time of the civil war with the Taleban, receives a desperate letter from her younger sister in Afghanistan: she has decided to end her life on the day before the coming eclipse of the sun. Dropping everything to hurry back Kandahar to save her sister, Nafas tries to enter Afghanistan by the way she had previously exited the country - via the Niatak refugee camp at the Iran-Afghan border. It’s here that the film really begins.

In his wordy treatise Mohsen Makhmalbaf opens with the comments: “If you read this article in full, it will take about an hour of your time. In this one hour, some 14 more people will have died in Afghanistan of war and hunger, and 60 others will have become refugees of Afghanistan in other countries. This article is intended to describe the reasons for this mortality and emigration. If this bitter subject is irrelevant to your sweet life, please avoid reading it.” Why the reference to the destroyed Buddha statue in the title of the treatise? “I reached the conclusion that the statue of Buddha was not demolished by anybody. It fell down out of shame - out of shame for the world’s ignorance towards Afghanistan. It broke down knowing its greatness didn’t do any good.”
More than likely, Makhmalbaf’s decision to give flesh-and-blood to statistics by introducing the motif of desperation shared by the separated sisters stems from a personal experience. “Since the day I saw a little 12-year-old Afghan girl - the same age as my own daughter Hanna - fluttering in my arms of hunger, I’ve tried to bring forth the tragedy of this hunger. But I’ve always ended up giving statistics. Why have I become so powerless!”
When Makhmalbaf arrived in Kandahar with a small team, after months of wrangling with the Pakistan authorities (who represent Afghan’s diplomatic interests abroad) to obtain the necessary visas, even the veteran filmmaker was taken back by the enormity of his task: “I never forget those nights during the filming. While our team searched the deserts with flashlights, we would see dying refugees left in the desert like herds of sheep. When we took those whom we thought were dying of cholera to hospitals in Zabol, we realized they were dying of hunger. Since those days and nights of seeing so many people starving the death, I haven’t been able to forgive myself for eating any meals.”

As for the imminent dangers of shooting in a country that doesn’t tolerate images of any kind, Makhmalbaf could draw upon his own experiences of making another film on an Afghan theme: >The Cyclist< (1987), shot in Peshawar. “I remember the day I was arrested and handcuffed.” And although friends and colleagues warned him to be careful on the Kandahar project, because of threats of kidnapping and terrorism at the borders, “I kept saying my subject was humanitarian and not political.”
Even that turned out to be an illusion: “One day, when we were finished filming at the border, I come across a group that have come either to kill or kidnap me. They ask me about Makhmalbaf. I am sporting a long thin beard and wearing Afghan dress.” A Massoudi hat with a shawl covering it and half of my face makes me look like an Afghan. I send them the other way and begin running. I cannot figure whether they have been dispatched by a political group or sent by smugglers to extort money.”
The film finished, Mohsen Makhmalbaf has expressed his own doubts on “why did I make that film or write these notes? I don’t know, but as Pascal put it: ‘The heart has reasons that the mind is unaware of’.” >The Road to Kandahar< was awarded the Ecumenical Prize at Cannes.

Lenin’s Last Days: Alexander Sokurov’s Taurus
The second in a planned trilogy on “men of power in the 20th century” - the first was >Moloch<, his 1999 Cannes entry about Adolf Hitler that won the Best Screenplay award for collaborating poet Yury Arabov - Taurus focuses on the last days of Lenin, depicting the once powerful communist leader as a feeble, infirm, senile recluse living out his last days during the summer of 1923 in a confiscated country estate surrounded by his wife and sister, the guards and caretakers, the doctors and medical staff. Struck down by a second debilitating stroke that rubs out much of his memory, Lenin finds himself cut off from the rest of the world, particularly from the intrigues and maneuvers of Trotsky and Stalin for top position in the Kremlin hierarchy.

For most of the film, Lenin (Leonid Mozgovoi) wrestles with his muddled thoughts and quarrels with his wife and sister as to tries to put together pieces of his past. Just as Eva Braun, bored and isolated, played a key role in Moloch, so too is some extra light thrown on Lenin’s character by the presence of his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya (Maria Kuznetsova), and sister (Natalia Nikulenko). Midway though the film Joseph Stalin (Sergei Razhuk) arrives, and we sense that the reins of the Party are now firmly in his hands, save for the possibility that Lenin’s last testament (requesting the removal of Stalin as General Secretary) might see the light of day. All four actors, to the director’s credit, are dead ringers for the historical personages they interpret.

Alexander Sokurov described Lenin’s last days so: “This family and this man have no home. Not only have they lost their home, but also the very possibility of ever having one. I would even say ‘by definition’ - for whenever a man acquires a great deal of power, he loses his home. When there are no limits to power, there are no more limits to protect one’s personal living space. Everything that you own by right of power invariably turns out to be not yours, but ‘somebody else’s’ … Even back then, this house had the appearance of the museum it would later be turned into.”

A contrasting view by Yury Arabov, poet and screenwriter for all of Alexander Sokurov’s feature films, on Lenin’s last disabled year has a metaphysical ring: “The time for decisions was over. Having expunged God from his soul, he comes face to face with the only possible company. His only interlocutor, his confessor and his executor, is the approaching Non-Existence, Nothingness. This is, in fact, the main character of the film.”

Of the three Russian stylists once named as “rightful heirs” to Andrei Tarkovsky - Ivan Dykhovichny, the late Alexander Kaidanovsky, and Alexander Sokurov - only Sokurov’s cinema has survived the test of time. Always searching for new formulas to employ the language of cinema, he probes the human experience through the eyes of a skeptic and pessimist. One meeting with Alexander Sokurov is all that’s needed to feel that down deep he’s a restless man, a filmmaker who invites controversy by the very choice of his themes, an artist who will talk circles around the meaning of his films rather than offer any kind of direct answers that may come back later to haunt him.

Born in Siberia into a military family that was always on the move, he spent his childhood in Poland, his youth in Turkmenistan, and his university years in Gorky and Moscow before settling down in St. Petersburg to work at the Lenfilm Studios on documentaries and feature films. When his diploma film at the Moscow Film School (VGIK), >The Lonely Voice of Man< (1978), was rejected by school officials as being too negative and pessimistic, Andrei Tarkovsky was among those who spoke out in his defence. Moving on to Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) to make Lenfilm his permanent base, Alexander Sokurov spent most of the 1980s fighting to get his films released, if not completely banned with the negatives destroyed. In the case of >The Summer of Maria Voynova<, or >Maria< (1978/88), he had to wait a decade for this portrait of an exploited woman laborer on a collective farm to be released in its uncut version. His literary homage to George Bernard Shaw, Painful Indifference (1983/87), had to be pieced together from a partially destroyed negative when it was presented at the Berlinale.

Most critics have nothing but praise for his cycle of poetic “elegies” - seven to date on key personalities in Russia and the ex-Soviet Union - and his interview documentaries: >Confession< (1998), in which young Russian sailors openly speak their mind;>The Knot< (1998), a 90-minute interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn; followed by >Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn< (1998). But it was his feature films that drew the most critical attention and prompted the comparison with Tarkovsky as a stylist with vision: <Days of Eclipse< (1988), >Save and Protect< (1989), >The Second Circle< (1990), and >The Stone< (1992).

Beginning with The Stone - from a shelved screenplay titled Chekhov:
The Last Year that dated from the late 1970s - an optical “ashy haze” was introduced as a formal component, a stylistic trait reminiscent of the “gauzy mist” employed by Carl Theodor Dreyer to achieve the eery atmosphere in >Vampyr< (1932). He perfected the camera technique in >Mother and Son< (1997), a poignant sketch of a son’s undying love for his mother as he carries her to a resting place before she breathes her last breath, the soft images of the landscape are seen through the tears of the son. In >Moloch< (1999) it’s the morning mists shrouding the castle-fortress in the Bavarian Alps that set the tone as Eva Braun restlessly awaits the arrival of Adolf Hitler and his guests. Now, in Taurus, photographed as well as directed by Sokurov, the last days of Lenin are filtered through opaque landscapes, grey skies, dimly lit interiors, and exaggerated sounds that vent the emotions of a troubled mind.

Masters II: Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
Shohei Imamura’s >Akai hashi noshitano nurui mizu (Warm Water Under a Red Bridge)< marks his fifth appearance in the official program at Cannes. Besides receiving the Palme d’Or for >The Ballad of Narayama< in 1983 and >The Eel< in 1997, he was here in 1987 with >Zegen, The Lord of the Bordellos<, based on the sexploits of Orient prostitution kingpin Iheiji Muraoka from 1902 to 1941; with >Black Rain< in 1989, an indictment of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima with its life-draining radiation effects lasting to the present day; and in 1997 with >Kanzo sensei (Dr. Akagi)< in 1997 , a touching homage to his own father as one of several dedicated country doctors who fought against hepatitis during the 1950s.

A shy and modest man of recognized integrity in the ranks of veteran Japanese directors, the 74-year-old Shohei Imamura studied western history for five years at the University of Waseda, while at the same time taking an interest in theater and writing his own plays for stage production. Several of the actors he worked with there - Shoichi Ozawa, Kazuo Kitramura, Takeshi Kato - later appeared in his films. Kazuo Kitramura, in fact, can be seen in Warm Water Under a Red Bridge in a supporting role.

In 1951, Imamura found work at Shochiku Studios as an assistant director to Yasujiro Ozu, Masaki Kobayashi, and Yoshitaro Normura. Like Ozu, he prefers to let his films speak for themselves. Moving on to the Nikkatsu Studios in 1954, he collaborated with Yuzo Kawashima on his scripts and assisted So Yamamura and Kinuyo Tanaka on their productions - until he could direct his first film in 1958: >Stolen Desire<. In 1965, he boldly created his own production company, thus becoming one of the pioneers of Japanese independent films. A perfectionist with a hand on every key element in a production, he has directed 19 films over the past 40 years. In addition, he founded in 1975 the Cinema and Television Institute of Yokohama, known today as the Japanese Academy of Visual Arts.

A director with a high regard for women and their place in Japanese society, Shohei Imamura feels that the 21st century will not only be the era of science and technology. “It will also be the era of women. The films I directed in the last century - such as >My Second Brother< (1959), >Pigs and Battleships< (1961), >The Insect Woman< (1963), >Intentions of Murder< (1964), >Eijanaika< (1981), >The Ballad of Narayama< (1983), and >Zegen< (1987) - all depict very strong women who accept their fates even in an era when women had been believed to have no actual practical role in society, or were simply regarded as ‘inferior’ to men.”

In >Warm Warm Under a Red Bridge< Yosuke (Koji Yakusho) has been laid off from work, his wife has left him but rings him regularly on his mobile phone to ask for money, and he wanders the streets of Tokyo in search of odd jobs. One day, he hears a story from an old homeless wanderer about a gold Buddhist statue stolen from a temple in Kyoto that’s hidden in a vase lying underwater by a red bridge in a town on the Noto Peninsula of the Japan Sea. When the old man dies, Yosuke decides to go to the town and find the gold statue. Upon reaching his destination, he meets Saeko (Misa Shimizu), a kleptomaniac with the power to make flowers bloom out of season. Saeko, who lives with her grandmother in a house near a red bridge, suffers from not being able to hold water, a condition that’s related to the mysterious water she secretes when experiencing physical pleasure..

Yosuke and Saeko are attracted to each other. When they first have sex, a gush of water springs forth from her body like a magic fountain, watering the flowers and attracting the fish. Thereafter it becomes a game: Yosuke has to be there when Saeko needs him - until, gradually, he manages to cure her of her mysterious illness despite the forfeiture of his newly found pleasures. That’s when another stranger from Tokyo suddenly appears in town. He, too, has heard the story from the old man about the vase in the water with the gold statue. No matter, for by this time the story has shifted to a lively comedy.

Imamura enthusiasts will appreciate the dramatic subtleties of the acting performances of Koji Yakusho and Misa Shimizu in >Warm Water Under a Red Bridge<. They are the same couple that appeared in >The Eel<. Yakusho was also seen last year at Cannes as the bus driver in Shinji Aoyama’s Eureka and is currently recognized as Japan’s leading male actor. The same goes for Misa Shimizu: after receiving the Japanese Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in >The Eel<, she now ranks among Japan’s most sought-after actresses. When will we see the couple again on the screen? “Wait for the next Imamura film,” quipped a Japanese critic.

Family Dilemma: Shinji Aoyama’s Desert Moon
“In Eureka I observed the collapse of the modern family from the outside,” said Shinji Aoyama in reference to the winner of the FIPRESCI Critics Prize and Ecumenical Award at last year’s Cannes festival. “In >Desert Moon< I am looking at it from the inside. He added that the theme of the “family” transcends religion, ideology, or race in Japanese society. “I was hoping to catch a glimpse of this theme through the actions of the three main characters in >Desert Moon<.”

In his earlier films, Aoyama told stories that focused on social misfits burdened with the psychological baggage of postwar Japan. Since the mid-1990s, when he burst upon the scene with the enigmatic >It’s Not in the Textbook< (1995), a straight-to-video project, he has worked at a resolute pace reminiscent of the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Helpless (1995, awarded the Grand Prix at the Japanese Film Industry Professional Awards), >Chimpira (Two Punks)< (1996), >Wild Life< (1997), >Tsumetai chi (An Obsession)< (1997), >Shady Grove< (1999), >Embalming< (1999), >Eureka< (2000), the documentaries >June 12, 1998< (2000) and >Roji-e< (2001), and now >Desert Moon<.

Born 1964 in Kita-Kyushu, Shinji Aoyama studied at Rikkyo University, where, influenced by Shingehiko Hasumi’s classes on film criticism, he began to make 8mm films: >Straight to the Night< and >The Red Muffler<. Upon graduating, he entered the film industry as a prop assistant, then rose to assistant director (Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s >The Guard from the Underground<). Meanwhile, he contributed essays and criticism to Cahiers du Cinema Japan and Esquire Japan. Aoyama also worked as assistant director on Fridriksson’s Cold Fever, the story of a Japanese youth journeying to Iceland to fulfill a burial ritual and thus pay due respect to his deceased parents, and assisted Swiss director Daniel Schmid on >The Written Face<, a made-in-Japan feature that incorporated native script and other traditional cultural images.

Shinji Aoyama is widely respected as a key figure in the current Japanese film revival. Take Riju Go’s >Chloe<, for instance, the Japanese competition entry at this year’s Berlinale. It’s directed by the same actor who played the killer in the opening sequence of Aoyama’s >Eureka<. Since Riju Go and Shinji Aoyama produce out of the same Tokyo-based Suncent Cinema Works, Aoyama return the >Eureka< compliment by acting in Go’s >Chloe< - he’s the writer Kitano who gets killed along the way!

As for >Eureka<, a three-and-a-half-hour low-budget road-movie with improvised twists and turns in the casual story line, it drew its thematic strength from >The Searchers< (1956), a John Ford classic. In fact, the final scene in >Eureka< is almost a direct quote from the closing minutes of >The Searchers<, the scene in which John Wayne turns to Natalie Wood to say “let’s go home” … to start life all over again. The setting is Kyushu in southwest Japan, where on a hot summer morning a municipal bus is hijacked (by Riju Go) and only three people survive the carnage, among them the driver (Koji Yakusho, who played the lead in Shohei Imamura’s >The Eel<, the 1997 Golden Palm cowinner).

Shot in black-and-white, sepia-tone cinemascope, >Eureka< took its title from a Jim O’Rourke rock album. According to the director, it’s both an “inward road movie” and a “western movie tracing the journey of a soul” (thus the comparison with >The Searchers<, the John Ford classic), a multi-textured film that speaks to both the painful reality of contemporary Japan and the calamities suffered worldwide wherever the moral order is in evident disintegration. Its inspiration came from the recent sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway and a rise in senseless violent crimes in Japan.

Shinji Aoyama is well aware of the dilemma of depicting the Japanese family in contemporary cinema: “Although impossible, I still hoped to describe in >Desert Moon< a family different from those depicted in the works of Yasujiro Ozu and Tatsumi Kumashiro. Because of the financial breakdown in Japan, culturally immature people from the middle class went through a kind of craziness. As a result, we are witnessing the total collapse of ethics. People are ready to sacrifice everything to maintain the same dreams they had in more affluent times. What I wanted to describe in this film is the needs of the contemporary family.”

Nagai (Hiroshi Mikami), once regarded as a successful information-highway businessman, finds himself cornered. His company has gone public on the stock exchange, and he’s now at the service of his stockholders. The goal he had longed to reach now seems “like a desert” stretching out before him, impossible to attain. Further, his wife Akira (Maho Toyota) and daughter Kaai have left him. To keep their memory alive, he carries their images around with him on a camrecorder. He’d like to find them, but doesn’t know where to begin. As for Akira, on the verge of sinking into alcohol, she’s returned with Kaai to the countryside of her childhood. This is where the young mysterious stranger Keechie (Shuji Kashiwabara) enters the scene. Abandoned by his parents as a child and hardened by life on the streets, he will do anything for money, even kill if necessary. All three alienated figures converge at Akira’s childhood refuge in the country.

Contrary to the tight narrative style that characterized >Eureka<, a wandering road-movie that unfolded gradually, >Desert Moon< makes its point at the outset and then portrays in detail the excruciating pains felt by all members of the divided family. One analogous scene introduced into the story underscores the dilemma of today’s disintegrating Japanese family: Keechie is witness to a fit of rage as another homeless boy from the streets takes revenge on his drunken father by brutally killing him in a garage.

Taiwan Triumphs: Hou Hsiao Hsien and Tsai Ming-liang
Altogether, 20 feature films from the Far East and the Subcontinent were programmed at Cannes: 8 in the Programme Officiel, 6 in Un Certain Regard, 4 in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, and 2 in the Semaine International de la Critic - in addition to another 6 short films selected for these sections. The presence of three Japanese entries in the Competition was surely a first at Cannes, to say nothing of double entries from Taiwan. Critics noted the name Du Tuu-chih, who was awarded by the international jury the Technical Prize for Sound for his work on both films from Taiwan: >Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Qianxi mambo (Millennium Mambo)< and Tsai Ming-liang’s >Ni nei pien chi tien? (What Time Is It There?)<.

The Palme d’Or for Best Short Film was awarded to David Greenspan’s >Bean Cake< (Japan/USA). Yang Chao’s >Dai bi (Run Away)< (China) shared the Third Prize in the Cinéfondation competition. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s >Kaïro< (Japan), an entry in Un Certain Regard, was awarded a FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize. Iran continued its winning streak with two citations: Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s >Safar é Gandehar (The Road to Kandahar)<, a French coproduction, was awarded the Ecumenical Prize, while Sayyed Reza Mir-Karimi’s >Ziré nouré mâh (Under the Moonlight)< received the Semaine Internationale de la Critique Award.

Time plays a central role in both Taiwanese films. In Hou Hsiao Hsien’s >Millennium Mambo< we are asked to view the present from ten years hence - in a flashback from 2011 - with the focus on the drug-and-rave scene in today’s Taipei, and it’s anything but pretty. At the same time, Hou recalls his own youth: “Looking at young people around me, I find that their cycle and rhythm of birth, age, sickness, and death are moving faster than those of my generation. This is particularly true among young girls: like flowers, they start fading as soon as they bloom. The process occurs in an instant.” In Tsai’s >What Time Is It There?< a street-hawker sells a watch to a girl who’s about to leave Taipei for Paris. Since it’s a watch that shows two different time zones at once, the motif provides Tsai with the opportunity to narrate adjacent stories by cross-editing between what’s happening in Paris and what’s going on in Taipei. The twist comes when the boy is watching a pirated copy of Truffaut’s Les quatre cent coups at the same time when the girl bumps into Jean-Pierre Léaud in the Père Lachaise cemetery.

Yasunari Kawabata and Claire Denis: Trouble Every Day
Part love story, part thriller, part vampire movie, Claire Denis’s >Trouble Every Day< will not leave the viewer cold. Running out-of-competition, it was the most complex and consequent of all the films presented in the official program at Cannes. Denis describes the film as “a kind of dream, a dream I had as a child, not quite a nightmare. My mother tucks me in and devours me with kisses, because my skin has a milky aroma, she says, and because she can feel herself suddenly becoming an ogress once more (as if being an ogress was a natural, former state to have when in love). I clinch my eyes shut. I’m paralyzed by her love and I wait for the bite …”

Dreams, the world of literature, the moral questions of the day, all these are central to Claire Denis and crucial in plumbing the depth of her cinema. One glance at a British critics’ poll taken last year is all you need to know about the international status of the French woman director: her >Beau Travail (Good Work)< was cited by nearly all among the Ten Best Films released in 2000. Presented in the competition at the 1999 Venice festival, >Beau Travail< drew upon Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, a refined literary work found among the American writer’s papers in 1924, to fulfill an assignment at La Sept/ARTE on the theme “Foreign Countries” - namely, stories about French people living abroad.

Since Denis had been raised in Africa, she returned to the Gulf of Djibouti, where the French Foreign Legion maintains a training base, to explore the moral question of good and evil, love and hate, in a closed community as recorded in the diary of Galoup (Denis Levant), a jealous non-commissioned officer and ex-legionnaire. Three years in the making, and filmed almost without dialogue, Good Work fascinates as a chain of episodes minimalist in concept and impressionistic in realization. Further, this choreography of naked, muscular, gleaming, sun-baked male bodies - moving in rhythm against a backdrop of sea, sand, and desert - were enhanced by camerawoman Agnès Godard’s remarkable talent for detail and composition.

Added to this “ballet in the desert” were subtly integrated chords from Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd. Even more significant were the giveaway references to key French films of the past about the African Question and the Algerian War - namely, the presence of Michel Subor in >Beau Travail< as the helpless commanding officer. Subor had previously played nearly the same role in Jean-Luc Godard’s >Le Petit Soldat< (1960), an outspoken anti-Algerian War film. Not to be forgotten either is Claire Denis’s own >Chocolat< (1988), her debut feature film invited to compete at Cannes. Like Beau travail, it drew upon experiences of her own childhood in Africa, particularly growing up in the home of a French diplomat stationed in the Gulf of Djibouti. Chocolat, with its metaphorical reference to a black culture, came across to this viewer as a haunting dream.

Now the circle has closed, and Claire Denis is back in Cannes with a film inspired by a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, awarded in 1968 the Nobel Prize for literature. Denis cites Kawabata as a writer who has always been an important cinematic source for her. The author of over 500 novels and short stories, Kawabata took his life in 1972 at the age of 72, his death usually credited to having taken addictive sleeping medicine for the last fifty years of his life that eventually took its toll upon his brain. This said, the sure cinematic reference to >Trouble Every Day<, a weird tale of brain research and “the bite of the vampire,” is found in Kawabata’s own life and one of his heralded masterpieces: The House of Sleeping Beauties, published in 1960.

The key literary passage that fascinated the filmmaker begins with an ominous moral discovery: “One day, when Eguchi withdrew his face from her, he noticed pearl drops of blood around her nipple. Eguchi had been surprised. He had concealed his emotions, however, and bringing his mouth slowly to her breast he had drunk her blood. In her ecstasy the girl had not noticed… The feeling that he had secured from her a gift capable of increasing man’s strength had not faded even now, at the venerable age of 67.”

“I wanted to make a film about love,” said Claire Denis about >Trouble Every Day<: “There won’t be violence at first, but desire: bodies giving themselves up, lips reaching out, opening. The man says to his woman (or vice-versa): my love, I am going to devour you with love.” The American newly-weds, Shane (Vincent Gallo) and June (Tricia Vessey), are in Paris on their honeymoon. But it’s not an ordinary honeymoon. In the past Shane has been involved in experiments into the human libido and is tormented by a ravenous hunger that will not be quieted. He is in Paris to find Léo (Alex Descas), who has been expelled from the same laboratory Shane once worked at. Léo now spends his time at home with Coré (Béatrice Dalle), his ill wife, while still continuing to work on experiments forbidden by the government for secret reasons.
Part love story, part thriller, part vampire movie, >Trouble Every Day< will not leave the viewer cold. It was the most complex and consequent of all the films presented in the official program at Cannes.

Masters III: Mañoel de Oliveira, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard
Three seemingly ageless veteran directors - Mañoel de Oliveira (93), Jacques Rivette (73), and Jean-Luc Godard (70) - competed with entries that received warm reviews, but they were also crowd-pleasers and will surely make the rounds of major festivals on the circuit in the months to come. By an odd coincidence, all deal with theatrical performances or related artistic expression, and each is anchored to the imperative of love.

In Oliveira’s >Vou para casa (I’m Going Home)< (Portugal/France) Michel Piccoli is a stage actor who has played all the major roles in a long and fruitful career. One evening, after performing Ionesco’s Exit the King, he receives word from an old friend that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law were killed in an auto accident. The wounds mend slowly, mostly because there’s his grandson to look after and dote on. Then comes the role of Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, along with an acquaintance with a young actress playing Miranda, and life gets a lift. Appearances by Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, and Sylvie Testud make >I’m Going Home< a delight.

In Jacques Rivette’s >Va Savoir (Who Knows)< (France) an Italian troupe from Turin arrives in Paris to perform Pirandello’s As You Desire Me, the title alone setting the stage for the real-life drama. The play’s lead actress Camille (Jeanne Balibar) had left Paris three years before because of Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffe), whom she doesn’t want to meet again because of her new relationship with stage director Ugo (Sergio Castellitto). Ugo, too, has a secret: the visit to Paris allows him to search for a lost Goldoni manuscript, but leads him instead to the seductive Dominique (Hélène de Fougerolles). Each of the protagonists is confronted with a certain truth about themselves as the plot meanders along in different directions. Indeed, since the director pulls ideas out his pocket on the very day of shooting, >Who Knows< offers riddles that only the audience can really resolve - a winsome comedy and vintage Rivette.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s >Êloge de l’amour (Eulogy of Love)< (France) the setting is again Paris and marks a return of the director from experimental video to conventional filmmaking. “I had a vague idea that had a title,” announced Godard in his usual cryptic manner. “I had something usually known as a love story. My idea was to relate it counter-chronologically.” In other words, the end is at the beginning and the beginning at the end. Further, the story is told through three couple of different ages: young, adult, and old. All are asked in the film to work of a “project” - something between an opera and a movie, a play or a novel. The link that ties the stories together is four key moments of love - meeting, passion, separation, reunion - akin to the four seasons, in nature and in life. Each episode was shot separately, then integrated into a whole - backwards - during the editing process. Is >Eulogy of Love< a drama? An essay? A mellowed Godard reflecting on his own past? Probably all of these, but maybe something more - a eulogy of love in the sense of praise of the everlasting and esteem for the eternal.

Courts Métrages & Cinéfondation
“A basket of jewels” best describes the 12 short films competing for Palme d’Or honors. Judged by a separate international jury headed by French director Êrick Zonca, it’s also awarded prizes to entries in the Cinéfondation competition. Each short in the Official Program had its own style, some with a surprise twist, others with a profound human message. For example: David Greenspan’s >Bean Cake< (Japan/USA), awarded the Golden Palm. The story of a poor lad whose mother cannot afford to pay for a proper uniform on the first day of school, he is made fun of by his classmates but still has the pride to stand up for his favorite snack. Or Irvine Allan’s >Daddy’s Girl< (UK), in which a cowed and freezing 7-year-old girl stands in the rain before a pub waiting for her father, who’s inside drinking. A touching film that goes right to the bone, it was awarded the Special Jury Prize.

Last year, the Cinéfondation consisted of two full programs. This year, four programs with 20 films contended for top honors. The First Prize was awarded to Sergei Luchishin’s >Portrait< (Russia/Ukraine), a short feature of 18 minutes directed by a Ukrainian student at the Moscow Film School (VGIK). As witty as it is critical, this bittersweet portrait of Moscow is seen through the eyes and experiences of an artist lost in a city of moral decay. It should be noted that the Cinéfondation is already recognized as an effectual stepping stone to Un Certain Regard. Award-winners can easily gain entrance to the Résidence Cinéfondation in Paris for a four-month stay to develop a feature film project. Two directors previously awarded in the 1999 Cinéfondation competition were invited to Un Certain Regard this year. Dover Kosashvili’s >With Rules< (Israel/Georgia) paved the way for >Late Marriage<, just as Jessica Hausner’s >Inter-View< (Austria) opened the door for >Lovely Rita< (Austria Germany).

After the daily ordeal of watching a string of feature films, some rather long and demanding to sit through, the respite offered by the short films was a welcomed treat. Besides the 32 shorts seen in the Official Program, another 12 were programmed in the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs - plus three experimental entries under the rubric En Avant! - and the International Semaine de la Critique programmed 7 short features before each of the selected features, in addition to a “fête le court” that ran all day long and through the night.

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, the International Week of the Critics under programming director José María Riba paid a fitting tribute to German director Percy Adlon. Some Cannes veterans remembered how, back in 1981, Percy Adlon presented his debut feature Céleste to an overflow French crowd of Marcel Proust fans in the Cinéma Le Français on the Rue d’Antibes, the venue of the German series in the Cannes film market. Based on an autobiography by Proust’s housemaid, it recounted the living and working habits of the French author while writing À la cherche du temps perdu, starred Eva Mattes in the title role of the housemaid, and helped considerably to launch the director internationally.

Now, twenty years on, Percy Adlon was back in Cannes with a trio of quaint shorts from his >Die Strausskiste< (Forever Flirt) series, all based on musical motifs - waltzes and marches - in the works of Johann Strauss Jr. In Nijinsky at the Laundromat a homeless dancer undresses completely at a laundromat and waits for his clothes to dry while reading Nijinsky’s diary. In >The Autograph< the setting is St. Petersburg, where a student and famous conductor are having an affair. In Triumph of the Kiss a love parade and kissing celebration pair with a Strauss march that quotes from the same Haydn melody found in the German national anthem. That Percy Adlon has a deft hand for such cinematic études has been evident ever since >Die Schaukel (The Swing)< (1984), his warm, poignant family tale set in the gardens and palaces of München at the turn-of-the-century.

Prizes at 54th Cannes International Film Festival

Official Competition
Golden Palm: >La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room)< (Italy), director Nanni Moretti
Grand Jury Prize: >La pianiste (The Piano Teacher)< (Austria/France), director Michael Hanneke
Best Actress: Isabelle Huppert in >La pianiste (The Piano Teacher)< (Austria/France), director Michael Hanneke
Best Actor: Benoît Magimel in >La pianiste (The Piano Teacher)< (Austria/France), director Michael Hanneke
Best Director (ex aequo): Joel Coen, >The Man Who Wasn’t There< (USA), and David Lynch, >Mulholland Drive< (USA)
Best Screenplay: Danis Tanovic, >No Man’s Land< (France/Belgium/Italy/UK/Slovenia), director Danis Tanovic
Technical Prize for Sound: Du Tuu-chih for both >Qianxi mambo (Millennium Mambo)< (Taiwan/France), director Hou Hsiao Hsien (Taiwan/France), and Ni nei pien chi tien (>What Time Is It There?<) (Taiwan/France), director Tsai Ming-Liang

Short Film Awards
Golden Palm: >Bean Cake< (USA/Japan), director David Greenspan
Special Jury Prize: >Daddy’s Girl< (UK), Irvine Allan
Jury Prize: >Pizza Passionata< (Finland), Kari Juusonen

Cinéfondation Awards
First Prize: >Portrait< (Russia), director Sergei Luchizhin
Second Prize: >Reparation< (Sweden), director Jens Jonsson
Third Prize (ex aequo): >Dai bi (Run Away)< (China), director Yang Chao, and Crow Stone (UK), director Alicia Duffy

Camera d’Or (Best Debut Feature): >Atanarjuat the Fast Runner< (Canada), director Zacharias Kunuk

International Critics (FIPRESCI) Awards:
Competition: >La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room)< (Italy), director Nanni Moretti
Un Certain Regard: >Kaïro< (Japan), director Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: >Martha… Martha< (France), director Sandrine Veysset
Semaine Internationale de la Critique: >Le Pornographe (The Pornographer)< (France), director Bertrand Bonello

Ecumenical Award: >Safar é Gandehar (The Road to Kandahar)< (Iran/France), director Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Semaine Internationale de la Critique Award: >Ziré nouré mâh (Under the Moonlight)< (Iran), Sayyed Reza Mir-Karimi

Cannes Sidebar Notebook
Ron Holloway, Interfilm, 12 June 2001

For the first time in Cannes history, the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Jury awarded four prizes - instead of two - to entries in the separate sections of the festival: Compétition, Un Certain Regard, Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (or Directors Fortnight), and Semaine Internationale de la Critique (sometimes shortened to Semaine de la Critique, or Week of the Critics). Nanni Moretti’s >La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room)< (Italy) received the FIPRESCI Award in the Competition, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s >Kaïro< (Japan) in Un Certain Regard, Sandrine Veysset’s >Martha… Martha< (France) in the Directors Fortnight, and Bertrand Bonello’s >Le Pornographe (The Pornographer)< (France) in the International Week of the Critics.

Un Certain Regard
Two entries in Un Certain Regard - Jessica Hausner’s >Lovely Rita< (Austria/Germany) and Dover Kosashvili’s >Hatouna mehuheret (Late Wedding)< (Israel/France) - were directed by filmmakers who had previously been awarded in the Cinéfondation. Thus, the Cinéfondation has now become a logical stepping stone to Un Certain Regard. Also, the prestigious Caméra d’Or was awarded to Zacharias Kunuk’s >Atanarjuat the Fast Runner< (Canada), an entry in Un Certain Regard, marking the third year in a row that an entry in this section was singled out for Best Debut Feature honors.

Atanarjuat the Fast Runner (Canada), Zacharias Kunuk
>Atanarjuat the Fast Runner< is Robert Flaherty’s classic documentary >Nanook of the North< (USA, 1922) revisited. “It is totally Inuit,” states Zacharias Kunuk, “a story we all heard as children, told and acted by Inuit. We show how Inuit lived hundred of years ago and what their problems were, starting with their marriage problems. What happens when a woman is promised to one man but breaks a taboo and marries another?” And he adds: “It’s a universal story with emotions people all over the world can understand.”
Based on an ancient Inuit legend, >Atanarjuat the Fast Runner< is set at the dawn of the first millennium. Over countless generations Igloolik elders in this community of 1,200 people inhabiting a small island in the north Baffin region of the Canadian Arctic, have kept the legend alive by way of oral history. Indeed, archaeological evidence confirms continuous habitation going back 4,000 years. The legend is also used as a means of teaching the young the dangers of placing personal gain and desires above the needs of the community.
In ancient times powerful shamans led tribes of nomadic Inuits. In Inuit life their women wore facial tatoos and beautifully braided hair, their clothing was made of the skins of wolves and caribou, and their igloos and stone houses warmed by seal-oil lamps. Yet this is hardly a documentary in the familiar National Film Board of Canada mold - rather, it is a powerful drama that demystifies the exotic and discards the stereotype by telling a universal tale of survival and cultural ethics.
“When missionaries came,” says Zacharias Kunuk, they proclaimed shamanism was the devil’s work. But they didn’t look into what the shamans felt, or how they gave life to the dying, visited the dead, found trails over land and underground, or took to flight through the air. When the missionaries forced their religion on us, story-telling and drum-dancing were almost banned. Our film >Atanarjuat< is one way of bringing back lost traditions. I have never witnessed shamanism. I have only heard about it. One way of making it visible is to film it.”

Zacharias Kunuk, a sculptor in the Igloolik community, learned filmmaking by purchasing a camrecorder and then making documentaries on his people for television. After founding his own company, Igloolik Isuma Productions, he spent two years preparing and shooting >Atanarjuat the Fast Runner<. “We wanted to show how our ancestors dressed, how they handled their dog teams, how they argued and laughed and went through hard time - how they confronted evil and fought back. They had to get along, to work things our no matter what. This is the story we are passing on to others, just like it was passed on to us.”
As for the legend itself, it’s about two brothers - Amaqjuaq the Strong One and Atanarjuat the Fast Runner- who challenge the evil brought by an unknown shaman to a community twenty years before. Amaqjuaq wins the hand of the lovely Atuat away from the boastful son of the tribe leader, Oki, who takes revenge by killing Amaqjuaq in his sleep. Atanarjuat, however, miraculously escapes, running naked over the spring ice sea. That scene alone, with its striking images (cameraman Norman Cohn) of ice and sky, warranted the Caméra d’Or.

Storytelling (USA), Todd Solondz
If there ever was any doubt about the storytelling talent of Todd Solondz, whose trio of biting, satirical portraits of suburban America have become festival favorites, then it was all erased when his >Storytelling< caused a huge traffic jam before the Salle Bazin for the press screening and later had the audience howling with laughter in the Salle Debussy. Awarded the Grand Prize at Sundance for >Welcome to the Dollhouse< (1995), followed by the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at Cannes for >Happiness< (1998) Todd Solondz is generally recognized as a leading, though controversial, American independent filmmaker with style and vision - to say nothing of the scurrilous gaze he casts upon his neighbors in New Jersey.
How does Solondz come up with these painful, bittersweet, laughable, ridiculous stories, each weird tale seemingly cut from different branches of the same family tree? Some say he only has to take a walk down the street of any affluent Mid-American suburb. Others say it’s the talented actors who enjoy working with him in comical, rather preposterous settings. In >Happiness<, for instance, the focus is on the three Jordan sisters - Joy, Trish, Helen - each in search of an ever elusive bliss despite the onus of bickering parents. Below the surface, however, lies just the opposite: a psychopathic father who’s into paedophilia, some peculiar neighbors and eccentric in-laws, a boy in the throes of puberty waiting anxiously to have his first ejaculation. And what happens when it finally comes? The audience - or at least during the screening that I attended in the Directors Fortnight - was laid low with laughter!

In >Storytelling< - split down the middle into Fiction and Non-Fiction -- Solondz lets fly first at creative writing courses and then turns the world of independent filmmaking upside down. In Fiction a burnt-out black American writer, whose book “Sunday Lynching” (!) earned him a Pulitzer Prize back in the 1980s, leans back on his laurels to seduce the white girls in the class - and then gets stung by one in return when one reads for the class a confessional passage in her new story. In Non-Fiction a would-be documentary filmmaker returns to his alma mater to shoot some footage on what’s happening in suburbia today. His subject, an inarticulate high-school senior, wants to be a late-night talkshow host and thinks a documentary about himself might offer a short-cut around college enrollment - although his father says he can swing the entrance exam to Princeton anyway.
Todd Solondz also takes a good whack at the Sundance syndrome and the current splurge of insipid books on how to write a script. Indeed, >Storytelling< makes a strong argument for de-programming today’s kids running around in jeans and T-shirts who want to be directors.

Lovely Rita (Austria/Germany), Jessica Hausner
When Jessica Hausner’s short feature >Inter-View< (1999) received a Special Mention in the Cinéfondation competition, it was deemed by critics as the kind of film that marked a mature talent and thus confirmed the rationale of the Cinéfondation as both a competition at Cannes and a training residence for young filmmakers in Paris. Now >Lovely Rita< verifies Hausner’s status as a young Austrian auteur, one who feels that Michael Haneke, whose lectures she attended at the film academy in Vienna, “ranks as one of Europe’s best directors.”
The Haneke influence is clearly visible in >Lovely Rita<, the story of a 15year-old outsider who draws laughter from her classmates, disciplinary action for her teachers, and is not above striking back and wreaking revenge on her tormentors. Once, to get even, she locks a school-play competitor in the garderobe on the night of the performance - and then takes the part herself before an astonished audience. On another occasion, he spirits the asthmatic Fexi, her young neighbor with whom she has an intimate relationship and the only one with whom she feels comfortable, out of a hospital ward - then leaves him stranded and helpless at the railway station. And she coquettishly flirts with a bus driver just for the fun of it to see where it will lead.

“The subject of the film is the indifference of nature,” said Jessica Hausner in an interview, “which is funny and sad at the same time - good and evil, true and false, two sides of the same coin.” And she adds: “The story has a lot to do with hidden and suppressed impulses - and, of course, with the discrepancy between the surface of this middle-class existence and that which lies beneath.” A director who prefers working with nonprofessionals, she cast 550 girls before she found the right Rita. “I tried to select the people who brought with them what was necessary. In this way it was possible to just let them loose on one another without a great deal of directorial ‘steering’. I wanted it to be some kind of big bang.” That “bang” is what determines the finale.

Ganhar a vida (Get a Life) (Portugal/France), João Canijo.
Films about disrupted youth in rundown urban housing projects and gang murders in the streets are usual fare these days on the festival circuit. And when the lead roles are played by nonprofessionals - in many cases, the kids themselves - it makes for docu-dramas and fiction-documentaries of the first order. One glance at the Cannes record over the past decade tells the story. Back in 1995, Mathieu Kassowitz’s >Haine (Hate)< (France) and Larry Clark’s >Kids< (USA), both dealing with troubled disadvantaged youth in urban hellholes, competed for festival laurels and critical attention. This time around at Cannes, you can catch Miu-suet (Carol) >Boli shaonu (Glass Tears)< (Hong Kong) in the Directors Fortnight and João Canijo’s >Ganhar a vida (Get a Life)< (Portugal/France) in Un Certain Regard.
Another is Esther Gronenborn’s >alaska.de< (Germany), invited to compete at San Sebastian last year and to Moscow Panorama this year. Title notwithstanding, alaska.de is set in a forlorn, depressed section of East Berlin. When a 16-year-old, the daughter of divorced parents, arrives on the scene, she is told how to find her way around this drab neighborhood of graffiti, junkpiles, and ugly cement highrises by following above-ground waterpipes - “like pipelines in Alaska” - thus alaska.de, an urban ghetto as cold as Alaska. Add to this images bathed in steel-like sepia colors, camera angles denoting empty space, the use of DV cameras, credible performances given by the kids playing themselves, a senseless murder followed by yet another, and alaska.de is a tour-de-force in creative and stylistic vision.

>Get a Life< moves along the same narrative lines - although predictable as an urban tale, it’s nonetheless poignant in its realistic portrayal of life in urban ghettos. As in Mathieu Kassowitz’s >Hate<, we are back in the housing projects on the outskirts of Paris again. A youth gang is on a rumble, the cops arrive to break it up with the usual hands-on brutality, and a teenager gets killed. This time, however, the lad happens to be Portuguese. Everyone in the Portuguese community feels it’s best not to rock the boat - all except Cidália (Teresa Madruga), a middle-aged cleaning woman who wants to know the truth behind the killing.
Cidália, however, doesn’t get far in her self-appointed crusade to change things in the district. “We’re in France,” say her Portuguese friends and neighbors. “We’re not at home here. We want no trouble.” But this Jeanne d’Arc of the slums doesn’t give up. She may “get a life” of her own in the end, but along the way she loses her job, her friends … her family.

Aruku-Hito (The Man Who Walked on Snow) (Japan), Masahiro Kobayashi.
Last year, Masahiro Kobayashi presented his >Koroshi (Film Noir)<, shot in the far north of Japan, in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes. For many, he was a discovery to be noted and remembered. This year, he was invited to Un Certain Regard to present >Aruku-Hito (The Man Who Walked on Snow)<, also shot in the far north on the island of Hokkaido. Fans of this Japanese cult director will not be disappointed - for, as in Film Noir, the motif of the snow storm and the very feel of the icy cold in >The Man Who Walked on Snow< serve metaphorically to reflect the loneliness of the common man isolated by the harsh forces of nature.
Born 1964 in Tokyo, Masahiro Kobayashi shifted to screenwriting and directing after an aborted career in music as singer and composer. One of his scripts, Yellow Donkey That Has No Name, was awarded the prestigious Kido Prize in 1982 and later prompted the name of his production company: Monkey Town Productions. Although his first two independent feature films, >Closing Time< (1996) and >Bootleg Film< (1998), found their way to some international film festivals, it was the third, Koroshi, that attracted the attention of Marie-Pierre Macia’s team at the Directors Fortnight. The story of “a typical Japanese salaried man” getting laid off from his job during the recent Japanese recession, the man hangs fakes going to work and purposely avoids painful explanations to his wife and daughter. One day, when a total stranger offers him a job to kill someone, he accepts - and has to face the tragic consequences of his decision.

In >The Man Who Walked on Snow< the basic situation is only slightly altered. Nobuo Honma (Ken Ogata, seen in a supporting role in Film Noir) is at 63 a retired sake producer whose wife died two years ago. After passing on the secrets of his trade to his youngest son, Nobuo takes daily walks to a fish-breeding center high in the mountains, where he watches the development of little fish thrown into the pool. As the second anniversary of his wife’s death approaches, the old man prepares for a commemorative memorial ritual with his estranged first son and his former business partners. Pent-up ill feelings rise to the surface, and the occasion turns out to be anything but pleasant.

Pattiyude divasam (A Dog’s Day) (India/UK), Murali Nair.
Murali Nair, awarded the Camera d’Or for >Murana Simhasanam (Throne of Death)< at the 1999 Cannes festival, returned to Un Certain Regard with another film that spotlights the State of Kerala in southern India as a leading production center. The very fact that a London-based Indian director with only three short films to his credit - >Tragedy of an Indian Farmer< (1993), >Coronations< (1994), and >Oru neenda yathra< (1996) - could return to Kerala to make an hour-long debut feature within six weeks time speaks well for a new liberal production policy in Kerala. Nair’s second feature, >Pattiyude divasam (A Dog’s Day)<, running at just over an hour, is notable for the Mani Kaul input on the credits: Lalitha Krishna (Mani’s former wife) edited the film, Shambhavi Kaul (his daughter) was the art director.
In >The Throne of Blood< scored, a biting tale about the first execution in Kerala by electric chair, the focus is on a poor, pathetic thief from an impoverished community. Krishnan is a seasonal worker who lives on an island and depends on odd jobs by a possessive landlord to feed his family. When he steals a bunch of coconuts from his master’s grove to give his children something to eat, he unfortunately gets caught and is thrown in jail - only to be accused by the magistrate of an unsolved murder that had happened some years before. Events get more out of hand when politicians take up Krishnan’s cause to order to win election votes - which, in turn, prompts the entire populace to greet the arrival of electricity on the island by placing the thief on “the throne of death” to celebrate his execution.

In >A Dog’s Day< we are back again in a rural provincial area of Kerala. The ruling lord has just granted his people the “gift” of democracy, and they celebrate the occasion in grand festive style. To demonstrate his good will even further, the lord offers his devoted servant Koran the royal dog Apu. Admired by the entire village, Koran and his wife proudly display the royal dog wherever they go. One day, however, Apu bites a duck - then a boy. The rumor spreads that the dog has rabies, and that this was known all along by the former ruler. Democracy is thrown to the winds, as the mob instinct takes hold of the community. First, the villagers turn on Koran , then they show contempt for the kindly lord they once loved and respected. As the tension grows, and the community become more suspicious and divided, the worst is feared.

La Libertad (Freedom) (Argentine), Lisandro Alonso.
Lisandro Alonso is one of three talented Argentine directors whose debut features found their way to major international film festivals. The others are Israel Adrián Caetano, whose Bolivia (Argentine) was invited to the International Week of the Critics at Cannes (see Critics section), and Lucrecia Martel, whose >La Ciénaga (The Swamp)< (Argentine/Spain) was selected to compete at this year’s Berlinale. Filmed in the swamplands of the northwest, the setting for >The Swamp< is an old villa that holds secrets to split family relationships down the middle. By contrast, Alonso filmed >La Libertad (Freedom)< in the province of La Pampa, the large grassy plain of north-central Argentine.
“I saw Misael often in the Pampas, and I thought that his isolated way of life in the country reflected the way a person feels in the city,” says Lisandro Alonso about why his debut feature is about a simple woodcutter, Misael Saavedra, who pretty much plays himself. “To write the screenplay, I observed Misael’s life and marked the different moments of his daily routines. Writing the script was to structure the way Misael organized his day.” And it could be no other way, for Misael is one of those authentic nonprofessionals who’s never even been to the movies!
If that approach to cinema sounds familiar, then you are probably right in guessing that Lisandro Alonso - who wrote, directed, edited, set-designed, and executive-produced >Freedom< - is heavily influenced by the observant, humanistic, cut-from-life aesthetics of Abbas Kiarostami’s cinema. To put it bluntly, Alonso is fascinated by every move the woodcutter makes, and he expects us, too, to be drawn “within this time and space … in which Misael puts together his work routine and respects it.” Asked how his filmmaking style differs from documentary, he offers a subtle distinction: “If the film were a documentary, the camera would be at Misael’s disposal. Since it is fiction, it is Misael who is at the camera’s disposal. That’s why I think Freedom is fiction.” Further: “It is a film the viewer must finish.”
All well and good, but what happens if Misael himself decides to drop everything and move to the city? Alonso has a philosophical answer to that possibility too. “The film does not attempt to simply reflect Misael’s experiences, but rather to relate his life with other experiences - those of the spectators and mine, because I am someone who leads a completely different life in the city.” And then he comes full circle by letting the cat out of the bag: “If I had filmed a day in my life, it would have been the same as Freedom.” Maybe that’s the theme of his second feature.

Maimal (The Chimp) (Kirgizstan/France/Japan), Aktan Abdykalykov.
Not since Satyajit Ray’s magnificent Bengali trilogy - >Pather Panchali<, >Aparajito<, and >The World of Apu< - has there been as pivotal and consequent a trilogy about growing up as those made over a span of eight years by Kirgizstan director Aktan Abdykalykov: >The Swing< (1993), about his childhood; >Beskempir, or the Adopted Son< (1998), about his adolescence; and now >The Chimp< (2001), about his youth. And it’s no coincidence that Abdykalykov’s filmmaking base in Bishkek, the capital of Kirgizstan, is called Studio Beshkempir, named after the breakthrough film that gave him the independence he needed to make the films of his choice.
“Although this trilogy is in fact autobiographical,” maintains the director, “nevertheless this term shouldn’t be taken literally, because it encompasses not only my own fate, but also that of the people around me. And without a doubt it reflects upon a certain era, my entire journey, and the suffering within me. It’s my sufferings that are autobiographical. I wanted to show everything that had left a mark on me.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in >The Chimp<, depicting his youth in a Kazakhstan village as the 17-year-old lad waits to be called up for military service. Nicknamed “Chimp” because of his jug ears, he experiences the emotional turmoil of his father’s drinking, the departure of his mother and little sister from home, and his first stumbling effort to deal with a love for a girl that is not shared.
“I know that I am not handsome,” confesses Abdykalykov in a director’s statement, “but this fact was the origin of my spiritual development. It goes without saying that nowadays its doesn’t bother me, because appearance is not what counts.” Again, in another key statement: “Another memory left scars upon my soul, that of a man who used to drink. It is only now with age that this wound has started to heal, but the scars are there to remind me of the ordeals I endured.”
These recollections of the past are manifested psychologically and stylistically via the frequent use of mirrors throughout >The Chimp<. “They reflect the soul. Mirrors are found in all kinds of situations: on a skirt, on a bus, sometimes in different forms, other times broken. There’s always a new reflection, a new point of view. In the scene in which the father turns the mirror around, he no longer has the soul of a ‘normal person’. He has lost the battle against himself, so the only thing left for him to do is to shut down his soul by turning the mirror around.”
Tonino Guerra, a key collaborator on screenplays for Fellini and Tarkovsky, co-scripted >The Chimp<. This is also the first film that Aktan Abdykalykov, a painter before he became a filmmaker, has shot in color - carefully chosen colors to underscore the film’s changing moods.

 Jol (The Road) (Kazakhstan/France/Japan), Darejan Omirbaev.
A charter member of the “Kazakh New Wave” that burst upon the scene at the Moscow festival in 1987, critic, theorist and filmmaker Darejan Omirbaev (“Darezhan Omirbayev” in English) is often referred to as the “Robert Bresson of Central Asia.” Born 1958 in Uyuk/Dzambul in Kazakhstan, he studied mathematics at the University of Kazakhstan before entering the Moscow Film School (VGIK) in 1987. His first short film, >Summer Heat< (1988), was influenced by films of French Nouvelle Vague of the late 1950s.
After graduating from the VGIK with a thesis on cinema semiotics (Pasolini, Metz, Mitry), Omirbaev worked as a critic before directing his debut feature film: >Kairat< (1991), the story of a young man from a village who falls victim to loneliness and despair in the capital city. Invited to compete at Locarno, the film was awarded the Silver Leopard and the FIPRESCI Prize. Kairat, a kind of Truffaut/Leaud alter ego, is played by the same Talgat Assetov who later appeared in the title role of >Killer< (1998), programmed in the Certain Regard at the 1998 Cannes festival.
Omirbaev’s second feature, >Kardiogram< (1995), invited to compete at Venice and Nantes (where it was awarded the Special Jury Prize) sketches the fate of a young village boy sent for his health to a sanatorium in Almaty. Although the shy outsider ends up running away because no one understands his own language or culture, Omirbaev’s warming portrait emphasizes the dawning of a whole new universe in his consciousness.
>Jol (The Road)<, invited again to the Certain Regard, begins with a letter of love and respect addressed by Anara Kobessov (Saoule Jeksembaeva) to her husband, the filmmaker Amir Kobessov (played by Tadjik director Jamshed Usmonov). In it she describes a nightmare that has also troubled Amir in his sleep: in a crowded theater at Almaty, the Kazakh capital, the projectionist gets the reels mixed up during the premiere screening of his film - and images of an American karate film splash across the screen. The audience is amused - and want the action film to continue.
Amir is also disturbed by news from the village of his birth that his mother has fallen seriously ill. Anara encourages him to depart at once. On the road from Almaty to the village, Amir drifts off into daydreams and a journey into his past. Along the way, too, he dallies with a girl at an inn, losing precious time. Upon arriving in the village, his mother’s burial has already taken place without the presence of the son. A poignant tale, in the vein of an artist’s apologia pro vita sua.

Quinzaine des Réalisateurs

The International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize was awarded to Sandrine Veysset’s >Martha… Martha< (France), the opening film of the Directors Fortnight. Amos Kollek’s >Queenie in Love< (USA) closed the section. And it was hotly rumored that Quinzaine director Marie-Pierre Macia had to wrestle with the Moscow film festival for the premiere of Artur Aristakisyan’s >Mesto na zemle (A Place on Earth)< (Russia), one of the genuine highlights of this year’s Cannes festival. Altogether, eleven debut feature films competed for Caméra d’Or honors.
Some entries in the Directors Fortnight were labeled “orphan films” by the festival staff. Adopted from >The Orphan of Anyang<, a Chinese entry in the sidebar, an “orphan film” refers to an entry that has only a few known credits and practically no press material to accompany it until the actual print arrives at the festival a few days before its actual screening. Although an “orphan film” can sometimes turn out to be a major festival surprise when finally screened, due to the ground work of an active scout, it’s a major headache for the staff to pen a word of descriptive truth about the entry until the actual screening.

Martha… Martha (France), Sandrine Veysset.
Sandrine Veysset, one of France’s best directors - known at home, yet overlooked aborad - well deserves the long overdue recognition of opening the Directors Fortnight with >Martha… Martha<. A prestigious programming slot at Cannes, the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs launch traditionally assures prominence on the festival circuit, if not also a greater right of production independence. Veysset is a genuine auteur, whose hands-on-script policy of directing is evident from start to finish. Further, she learned the ins and outs of filmmaking from the bottom up: the set designer on Leos Carax’s celebrated >Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers of Pont-Neuf)< (1991), she still makes sure that art direction remains an integral aspect of the creative process. Look closely at her career credits, and you note that she prefers to work with the same people from project to project. Ognon Pictures has produced all three of her films, while each is photographed by the same camerawoman, Hélène Louvant.
Where does Sandrine Veysset fit in among France’s many talented women directors? Pretty much alone - she the “realist” in the group, just as Claire Denis is the “poetess” in the ranks. Indeed, it’s worth while at Cannes 2001 to compare Veysset’s >Martha… Martha< in the Directors Fortnight with Denis’s >Trouble Every Day< in the Competition on aesthetic grounds alone. One notes also a progression in Veysset’s oeuvre: from the documentary chronicle about a French farming family in >Y aura-t-il de la neige à Noël? (Will It Snow for Christmas?)< (1996) to the neorealist statement about losers on a dreary fairgrounds in >Victor… pendent qu’il est trop tard (Victor… While It’s Too Late)< (1998) to the spiritual depth of three castaways clinging to each other in >Martha… Martha<.

The cinema of Sandrine Veysset is one of questions rather than answers. The plight of the underprivileged, particularly women and children, working the fields in >Will It Snow for Christmas?< is a universal theme, but when a still rather young mother of seven children allows herself and her offspring to be exploited as unpaid farmhands in burning heat by a bogus husband, the pain is felt to the bone and demands retribution. In >Victor… While It’s Too Late< a boy of nine runs away from abusive parents to spend a night on a carousel and be taken in by a prostitute who cares for him like a real mother should. So why return home at all? Why exchange a dream for a trauma? The same trauma of a troubled family is explored in >Martha… Martha<, the focus this time on the mother Martha (Valérie Donzelli) - “a fugitive from a nightmarish childhood” (Veysset) - who can’t cope with everyday problems, with her marriage with Raymond that’s about to fall apart, with the needs of her own little daughter Lise…

Queenie in Love (USA/France), Amos Kollek.
Novelist, screenwriter, actor, documentarist, director, producer - no one knows the twists and turns of filmmaking, from the inside out, from concept to release, better than Amos Kollek. “I like to go my own way,” he once stated in an interview, “and I prefer to work with people I like.” Born 1947 in Jerusalem, Amos Kollek has always gone his own way. Son of the eminent mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, Amos had to do just that if he ever hoped to leave the shadow of one of the most popular figures on the Israeli political scene. He served in the Israeli army, received degrees in Psychology and Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, published his novels - Don’t Ask Me If I Love (1971), The Girl Who Brought the War (1973), After They Hanged Him (1976), and The Apple, the Singing and the Gold (1980) - and collaborated with his father on a personal biography, For Jerusalem, A Life (1979), to be capped later by the companion documentary Teddy Kollek (1994).
Kollek’s film career began as actor, screenwriter, and co-producer on >Worlds Apart< (1979). Then he directed >Goodbye, New York< (1984), starring Julie Hagerty; >Forever Lulu< (1987), with Hanna Schygulla and Alec Baldwin; >High Stakes< (1989), with Sally Kirkland and Kathy Bates; >Double Edge< (1994), with Faye Dunaway; and >Whore 2 (Bad Girls)< (1994). The international breakthrough came with >Sue< (1997), starring Anna Thomson, awarded the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the 1998 Berlinale. A year later, Kollek and Thomson were back again in the Panorama of the Berlinale with >Fiona< (1999), a hard-edge, half-fiction, half-documentary sequel to Sue that focused on the demimonde of the Manhattan crack-house scene. And, of course, Anna Thomson was seen again in Kollek’s, >Fast Food, Fast Women< (2000), a light-handed Manhattan comedy selected for the competition at last year’s Cannes festival.
As for >Queenie in Love<, the closing night film in the Directors Fortnight, this is a weird, kinky, hilarious Manhattan tales of unrequited love that features stock actors from the Amos Kollek fold. A sequel of sorts to his short feature >Angela< (2000), an “erotic tale” seen in the Cannes film market, it stars veteran actor Victor Argo and newcomer Valerie Geffner in the story of an aging ex-cop who’s diagnosed with terminal cancer and decides to get his last kicks in by robbing a bank. Horace (Argo) finds the perfect match in Queenie (Geffner), a Westchester socialite who prefers the slums of the East Village to her parents’ multi-million-dollar estate. They met when Queenie pulled one of her pranks on Horace, pretending to be a transvestite who’s a social worker on the side. Since the bank heist requires help, they enlist the support of Martha and Spencer, retired ex-gangsters who supplement their income by throwing S&M orgies in their apartment.

Mesto na zemle (A Place on Earth) (Russia), Artur Aristakisyan.
By virtue of his first film, the documentary >Palms (aka Hands)< (1994), Artur Aristakisyan is a legend in Moscow, across Russia, and at festivals the world over. Not even the director knows how many awards that extraordinary fiction-documentary has received - among them, the Nika (Russian Oscar) for Best Documentary, the Wolfgang Staudte Prize (International Forum of Young Cinema at the Berlinale), the Satyajit Ray Prize (San Francisco), the Ecumenical Jury Prize (Karlovy Vary), the Special Jury Prize (Munich), and the Prize for Contribution to Cinema Language (Taormina). What’s known is that after Aristakisyan received his heavy Nika statuette at a tuxedo-required ceremony broadcast on national television, he wandered the streets of Moscow looking for a place to put it - for he has no home of his own.

One ardent Russian critic referred to >Palms< as “a unique phenomenon bigger than just a piece of art.” Another questioned in his praise whether it was a documentary at all - rather: “Palms is an anomaly. It’s more like a long, very long theoretical treatise of radical anarchism with deep Christian roots, those of real Christianity, which preceded and opposed the churches and religious institutions.”
It took eight years for Artur Aristakisyan to enter the Moscow Film School (VGIK), another four years to make Palms, his diploma film. Originally a 12-hour portrait about beggars in his native city of Kishinev, the capital of Moldova, he caught unforgettable black-and-white images that leave the viewer lamed: a simpleton, an escapee from a mental asylum, a blind boy, a hunchbacked old woman, a man with no legs on a scooter, a disabled young man who refuses to move from his place “until the Kingdom of God comes.”
For the past five years, Aristakisyan has been working on the documentary >Mesto na zemle (A Place on Earth)<, also known under its former title >Maria<. For the last two years, he has been in a clinch with his producer, who still wants to recut the film, and with the artistic director of the Moscow film festival, who hoped to premiere the film there in June - instead of at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes.
>A Place on Earth< is about the poor and homeless who form a kind of self-protective community in the heart of today’s Moscow. It’s the story of six couples who maintain their dignity and remain together despite hunger, poverty, despair, degradation…until the police arrive to drive them from their “place on earth” and forcefully divest them of their young.

Anyang de guer (The Orphan of Anyang) (China), Chao Wang.
Over the past couple years, festival entries from mainland China have been awarded top prizes and critical praise, yet many were generally taboo on home ground and the directors themselves often no-show at the festivals. For instance, actor-director Jian Wen’s >Guaizi lai le (Devils on the Doorstep)<, awarded the runnerup Special Jury Prize at Cannes 2000, has yet to see the light of a projector’s booth in China. Novelist-screenwriter-director Shuo Wang’s >Baba (The Father)<, winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno, found its way in the competition under a “film surprise” rubric. Later, at Pusan, the major festival showcase for Asian cinema, The Father never arrived at all for its scheduled soldout screening - because the one existing print of the 1996 production is in illegal circulation, according to one source.
Then, at the Leipzig documentary festival in October, Chinese woman director Tian Yi Yang received the Golden Dove for >Lao tou (Old Men)<, but she herself failed to show. A feature-length video documentary about the daily routine of a group of retired oldtimers, >Old Men< was shot at regular intervals over a stretch of two years in the Qing Ta district of Beijing, where Tian Yi Yang lives. Each morning, the group would sit in the sun by a road, chat among themselves, then go home for lunch and return again. The routine followed the clockwork of a daily job, although they make no bones about their existence as “old and useless” and “waiting for the time to go” - as exactly happened to some oldtimers in the film.

Now the question of home release will be tested again in Chao Wang’s >Anyang de guer (The Orphan of Anyang)<, invited to the Directors Fortnight. All that was known about Wang before his arrival at Cannes was that he is the son of workers, labored in a factory before he became a writer, then was admitted to the Peking film school, graduating in 1994. After assisting veteran Chinese director Chen Kaige on his major festival productions, and working as assistant director on Temptress Moon and The Emperor and the Assassin, he published three short stories and a novel - >The Orphan of Anyang< being one of these.
Set in the ancient city of Anyang in Henan province, >The Orphan of Anyang< is the story of a prostitute who, desperately in need of money to make ends meet, decides to give her newly born child to an unemployed factory worker with the promise that she will pay the man a sum each month for child support. Meanwhile, a local gangster, dying from a terminal illness, wants to have the baby too - he hopes to have a descendant. Three lives, three fates, all pegged to conditions of the poor and underprivileged in China.

Boli shaonu (Glass Tears) (Hong Kong), Miu-suet “Carol” Lai.
Carol Lai - also credited by her Chinese name “Lai Miu-suet” - is well known on the Asian festival circuit as a promising Hong Kong director by virtue of her short feature >Father’s Toys< (1998), awarded the Best Short Film at the Cinemanilia festival in 1999 and seen the same year at the Pusan film festival. Born 1966 in Hong Kong, she found work in 1989 as an assistant director in the movie industry, then in 1993 became a producer for “Network-On-Air Promotion” at Star TV, where she made the clip >The Way They Walk< (1995). Her first feature film, >Boli shaonu (Glass Tears)<, was invited to the Directors Fortnight.
Carol Lai has always taken an interest in the plight of problematic children in Hong Kong. “My teaching experience at a special institute a few years ago has had a tremendous impact on my notion of growing up. I was dealing with teenagers who had been categorized ‘problematic’ although they were basically neglected children from dysfunctional and/or broken families… This inspired me to write a story about a 16-year-old teenaged girl dealing with growing up - a transient state of being at the same time a child and an adult.”
As for the film’s title >Glass Tears<, Carol Lai describes this transient state between adolescence and adulthood as resembling glass: “It is cold and brittle. You seem to be able to see through it, yet you feel trapped and isolated. This concept - being isolated - also had its influence on
my choice of the color scheme, the cinematography and even the cast.”

>Glass Tears< is narrated from contrasting viewpoints. The story of a Hong Kong street kid (Zeny Kwok), it’s about dysfunctional family life, a missing girl, and the demimonde of drugs and triad gangs. When Wu (played Law Lit, a 60-year-old Indonesian actor), arrives on the scene from mainland China in search of Ah Cho, his missing granddaughter, the lonely old man and retired policeman is obviously out of his element. Then he meets “P” and is given a shimmer of hope - the street-kid claims to be his granddaughter’s debt-collector. But is she really hiding Ah Cho from her grandfather? And why does the triad gang-leader and drug-dealer join the search? Most significant of all for grasping the full impact of the tale, does Ah Cho exist at all? In the labyrinth of missing teenagers, drugs and gangs, says Carol Lai, there are many 16-year-olds facing the same fate as Ah Cho, too many.

Marfa si bani (Stuff and Dough) (Romania), Cristi Piui.
Cristi Piui, director of Marfa si bani - given the English title Stuff and Dough, in the sense of “merchandise and money” - was born in Bucharest in 1967, came to cinema from a painting background, and, in 1992, enrolled in the School of Visual Arts at Geneva. After a pair of shorts - >Intérieurs< (1993) and >There’s No Place Like Home< (1994) - his diploma films >Avant de petit déjeuner (Before Breakfast)< (1995), was selected by the Locarno festival. Documentaries followed: >25.12. Bucharest, la Gare du Nord< (1996) and >L’aisle< (1996) - and now his first feature film, Stuff and Dough, contending for the Caméra d’Or in the Directors Fortnight.
Working abroad is hardly unusual for young Romanian filmmakers, for only two or three feature films are produced annually in post-Ceaucescu Romania - in contrast to circa 25 back in socialist times. The best known Romanian productions on the festival circuit - Lucien Pintilie’s >Lost Paradise (Venice entry)< and Radu Mihaileanu’s >Train of Life (Cannes entry)< - were coproductions made with French financial backing. Cristi Piui’s Stuff and Dough is thus an exception to the rule: he returned to Romania to shoot the low-budget feature with help from the National Center for Romanian Cinematography.
Made in the classic mold of a road movie, Stuff and Dough follows Ovidiu (Alexandru Papadopol) from Constanta on the coast to the capital of Bucharest. The young man, whose business is selling snacks and soft drinks, wants to expand and buy a kiosk. A mafia conman offers to lend him the needed money to get him started - provided he carries a bag containing some “stuff” on his trip to Bucharest for delivery to a friend. The decision turns out to be a mistake. As he continues along his way, from adventure to adventure, Ovidiu soon realizes the kind of mess he’s gotten himself into.

Fatma (Tunisia/France), Khaled Ghorbal.
Khaled Ghorbal’s >Fatma< comes across as a sociopolitical fiction-documentary with a clear feminist message to all Moslem women suppressed by traditions, religious or otherwise, that are still prevalent even in enlightened countries and in Tunisia in particular. Based on a true story, the focus is on a young woman who has been raped by a family member, then has to contend with the dilemma of hiding the brutal fact in order to “preserve her virginity” for the man she later hopes to marry - even if it means faking it on the wedding night. “The Tunisian woman remains confronted with the urgent need to speak out,” argues Khaled Ghorbal. “To speak out is the best defence against those who, for nostalgia’s sake, want to revive old practices to keep women subservient. May this film be a modest contribution to that need to speak out.”
Born 1950 in Tunisia, Khaled Ghorbal studied drama in Tunis and mime in Paris, staged plays at various theaters, and then formed a troupe of his own, Théâtre de Sfax, for which he wrote sketches and acted in them himself. In 1994, he enrolled in the Centre National de la Cinématographie for a four-year course. His short film, >El Mokhtar< (1996), was invited to several international film festivals. Fatma, his first feature film, is having its world premiere in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes.
Narrated in three chronological episodes determined by locations in Tunisia - Sfax, Tunis, Zannouch - the story opens with the death of Fatma’s mother. At 17, Fatma (Awatef Jendoubi) feels left alone, despite the presence in the home of her father, brothers, and sisters. A cousin comes to stay for a prolonged visit - and, one night, he rapes Fatma. The shame leads her to apply for admission to a school in Tunis, where she meets a young man, is infatuated, and agrees to sleep with him. The affair is short-lived, and she drops her studies. Now her father takes matters in his own hands: he send off to a remote village to work as a school teacher. There she meets a young doctor, falls deeply in love, and agrees to marry him. Wedding traditions in the village, however, demand proof of an unbroken hymen - so the only solution seems to be to fake the blood-stained ceremony with a few convenient stitches. But why bother in the first place to maintain a tradition based on a repressive moral code? Fatma has to decide whether on not to take a stand …

Semaine Internationale de la Critique

For the 40th anniversary of the Semaine International de la Critique, délégué général José María Riba has renamed the section the Semaine Internationale de la Critique to allow for the admittance of award-winning entries from other international film festivals. Thus, Christian Petzold’s >Die innere Sicherheit< (Germany) was invited to participate as the critical discovery of the past year. Cannes veterans will recall that the Week of the Critics was the first of the sidebar sections to gain prominence as a window to political and artistic cinema the world over. Later this year, Riba and his team will celebrate the anniversary in style in Paris. Bertrand Bonello’s >Le Pornographe (The Pornographer)< (France) was awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize, and Sayyed Reza Mir-Karimi’s >Ziré nouré mâh (Under the Moonlight)< (Iran) received the section’s own Semaine International de la Critique Award.
 
Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) (Germany), Christian Petzold.
Touted as “the discovery of the year” by FIPRESCI critics and tipped to win most of the laurels at the forthcoming Lola Awards this June, Christian Petzold’s >Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In)< ranks as one of the best German films of the past decade. Indeed, not since Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s >Die dritte Generation (The Third Generation)< (1979) has a film of this political brilliance come along to shake up German cinema. For >The State I Am In< is about the RAF, about terrorism, about hiding in the underground - in short, about themes that are generally anathema to TV producers and funding boards.
To Petzold’s credit, however, hardly a spoken reference is made throughout the film to the RAF and the terrorist side of the 1968 student revolt. Rather, from the first to the last shot, the viewer is asked to experience “the state of mind” in a terrorist family constantly on the run. As he stated in an interview, the idea for >Die innere Sicherheit< had been on his mind since the early 1990s, back when he was a student at the Berlin Film Academy (DFFB). Further, he credits theorist-filmmaker Harun Farocki, for whom he jobbed as assistant director, as the key collaborator to bring the project to fruition.. It was Farocki, as co-scriptwriter, who helped him weave a tight narrative anchored to sparse dialogue and visual metaphors.

The Security Within opens at a Portuguese seaside resort. It’s out-of-season. Jeanne, the 15-year-old daughter, sits alone at a beach-cafe learning Portuguese, for the next stop is Brazil and a new identity. When a boy asks her why she’s not in school, she lapses into silence. A man approaches with a translation question. The parents’ fear of being watched leads to the inevitable: they are robbed of their savings and must return to Germany. Hans and Clara discuss the possibility of turning themselves in, but give the idea up.
 From this point on the story is bizarre, gripping, free-flowing. Hans digs up buried loot from a previous bank-robbery - and finds a cache full of old marks. He contacts an old friend and RAF sympathizer for money - only to bring the police swarming to the rendezvous. Jeanne locates a hideaway - with information given by the boy from the beach. Clara finds out that Jeanne is meeting the boy - and now an outsider knows too much. A decision is made to rob a bank - and Hans is wounded in a shootout. Slowly, the net closes … the last relic of safety vanishes.
Christian Petzold’s >Die innere Sicherheit< scores the best German film of the past year - arguably of the past decade - and perhaps the key film to launch a German New Wave.

Bolivia (Argentine), Israel Adrián Caetano.
Supported by the Hubert Bals Fund at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Israel Adrián Caetano’s >Bolivia< in the Week of the Critics pairs with Lisandro Alonso’s >La Libertad (Freedom)< in the Un Certain Regard to underscore the return to Cannes of solid directorial talent from Argentina. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1969, Adrián Caetano moved at 16 to the province of Córdoba in Argentina, where he made several video shorts - among them Visite Carlos Paz, Blanco y negro, and Calafate - until a purse prize for a submitted script enabled him to shoot the short feature >Cuesta Abajo< on 35mm. Teaming with Bruno Stagnaro, they directed together Pizza, Birra, Faso - one of the box office hits of the season. As prolific as he is creative, Caetano followed with a pair of short features, La Expresion del deseo and No necesitamos de nadie, and the documentary Peces chicos, while preparing to shoot his best film to date: >Bolivia<.
Set in a rundown bar in Buenos Aires, Freddy (Freddie Flores) struggles to keep his head above water. He has left his native Bolivia in search of a job and a roof over his head, so that one day he can bring his family to Argentina and better life. As a cook at the bar, he earns 15 pesos a day, 5 of which go to making a daily phone call home to La Paz. Meanwhile, he meets other outsiders sharing the same fate as himself: Rosa, a waitress from Paraguay; a gay street salesman from nearby Córdoba, who feels discriminated against; and a taxi driver, who owes too many people too much money.
 As José María Riba, the programming director of the Week of the Critics, points out in the festival catalogue, Argentine cinema is graced by the creative talent of several young directors capable of using their narrative skills on impressive low-budget project. Israel Adrián Caetano, by virtue of >Bolivia<, a modest 75-minute feature, is one to keep a close eye on.

Ziré Nouré Mâh (Under the Moonlight) (Iran), Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi.
Last year, it was Iranian director Hassan Yektapanah who confessed in an interview that he was strongly influenced by Abbas Kiarostami in the making of his >Djomeh< (2000), a debut feature that took a year to shoot and was seven months in postproduction. At the same time that Yektapanah was putting the finishing touches on >Djomeh<, another young Iranian director, Seyed Reza Mir-Karimi, was being heaped with critical laurels for his debut feature: >Koudak Va Sarbaz (The Child and the Soldier)< (2000). “A brilliant debut,” wrote Jamal Omid, director of the Fajr and Tehran International Film Festivals. “The Child and the Soldier is an admirable example of a young filmmaker treading in the footsteps of Kiarostami by avoiding a cheap, sentimental approach.”
As simple as the story appears on the surface, >The Child and the Soldier< runs deeper as the it goes along. Essentially a road movie, the focus is on a boy barely into his teens and already a juvenile delinquent. He is being transported by a young soldier from a police station in the provinces to a reform school in Tehran, while the trip is being made on the last day of the year. And, as in Gianni Amelio’s >Il Ladro di Bambini (The Stolen Children)< (Italy, 1992), in which a policeman takes two disadvantaged children across Italy to a boarding school, several incidents happen along the way to foster a warm and human relationship between the soldier and the delinquent in his charge.
In >Under the Moonlight< Seyyed, a young theology student in a Koranic school, is about to rise to the status of Mollah. To prepare for the ceremony, he buys a new suit, but on his way back from the outfitters his brand new whistle is stolen. Seyyed follows the thief back to his shantytown community, where he is shocked at the terrible conditions. Instead of handing the thief over to the police, Seyyed befriends him and tries to change things for the better of the shanty community.

Efimeri poli (Ephemeral Town) (Greece), Giorgos Zafiris.
Greek cinema is not just Theo Angelopoulos, a genuine auteur whose >Eternity and a Day< was awarded the Golden Palm at the 1998 Cannes festival. Nor for the younger crowd is it Dimos Avdeliodis, whose >The Spring Gathering<, a film of poetic landscape beauty, was awarded a trio of prizes (Don Quixote, CICAE, Caligari) at the 2000 Berlinale. It’s also Giorgos Zafiris, whose >Ephemeral Town<, a stunning film allegory on time and memory, received an armful of prizes awarded by the Greek Ministry of Culture - Best First Film, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, and Third Prize for Feature Film. - and then was invited to the Week of the Critics in Cannes.
As noted in the press book supplied by the Greek Film Centre, “Ephemeral Town is an allegory on the individual and the collective, on the conflict between mobility and immobility, on identity and disparity, and finally on the consolation derived in recognizing and identifying with the ancient blood ties that exist between all men.”
Sound a bit too profound for your tastes? Then try the director’s own viewpoint: “Ephemeral Town is a look at those who live in foreign lands - the foreign land of the hero, who travels to limbo seeking some immobile parts of the world, and the foreign lands of the refugees, who were forced to leave their homelands in search of a better fate.” Giorgos Zafiris also confirms that the narrative line of the film is structured along three parts: “a-topia” - meaning no place, “ou-topia” - meaning utopia, and “topos” - meaning place.
Place all this into a storytelling context, and you have Andreas (Giorgos Dialegmenos) travelling to his dead mother’s home on a Greek island now flooded by “foreigners,” mostly tourists, dropouts, and retirees. The character of the landscape has also been changed, so much so that Andreas can no longer find his home. So he immerses himself in the myth of the island and rebuilds an “ephemeral town” to match his memories - and foreigners help him.
In other words, the hero of the film arrives on some island, which is never named, in search of the almost mythical home of his mother, who does exist, and this journey leads to the very heart of existence. All in all, an allegory worth pondering over, particularly if you are a student of Greek culture and philosophy.

Nuages - Wolken - Clouds (Belgium), Marion Hänsel
The closing film of the International Week of the Critics was one of the highlights of the Cannes festival: Marion Hänsel’s >Nuages - Wolken - Clouds<, an unusual blend of documentary with the experimental film. As a feature film director, Hänsel is best remembered for her thriller >The Quarry< (1998), set in a sun-scorched area of South Africa. The story of a fugitive on the run, an escaped criminal who murders a pastor on his way to an outlying village and then assumes his identity, it’s the landscape that sets the tone of the film with the stone quarry as the metaphor.
>Clouds< is memorable for two reasons. Over the years on her trips around the world Marion Hänsel has taken the time to photograph, with cameramen Didier Frateur and Pio Corradi, some quite striking sky formations: summer clouds, storm clouds, prairie clouds, mountain clouds, forest clouds. She takes particular delight in sunrises and sunsets, in noting how clouds “bend” to touch the earth, in capturing the approach of a monsoon - indeed, in the very harmony and disharmony of nature. Sometimes she cuts away to waterfalls and steam rising from craters and volcanoes. Often her “painted skies” reflect a time and place, and we can feel she is now in the Alps or Namibia, in Iceland or Reunion island. In short, this is a lovely film poem - about life, about the senses, about the glories of creation.
Added to the visual beauty is a poignant story of a mother passing on her thoughts to her 18-year-old son in the form of a filmed diary. Instead of using the voice of a single actress to chronicle her thoughts, Hänsel asked Catherine Deneuve to narrate the French version (seen at Cannes), Charlotte Rampling the English, Carmen Maurer the Spanish, and Barbara Auer the German. “I only gave the actresses an indication of what I wanted. I told them I didn’t want them to act, just to tell a story. Of course, the voices vary - there’s a completely different color and musicality to the languages.” Since the texts read by the actresses are, in fact, passages from letters she actually wrote to her son over the years, they are full of joy, hope, promise, apprehension.
 Midway through the film we are given a respite. Marion Hänsel has set aside a sequence to visit museums and her favorite painters, Turner and Constable, whose paintings of clouds have fascinated her since childhood. “When I was a teenager and wanting to become an artist, I was always trying to paint skies.” Now she has - on film.