Competition - Un certain regard - Directors Fortnight - International Week of the Critics - Prizes

Ron Holloway, Berlin, 5 June 2003

INTRODUCTION

Cannes, like Paris for Hemingway, is a moveable feast. So if the Competition appears somewhat lacking, as it did this year, you spend more time viewing entries in Un Certain Regard. Or you pay a couple more visits to the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs. Or you check out entries at the Semaine Internationale de la Critique. Or you cue up at the Federico Fellini Retrospective to see Claudia Cardinale introduce 8 1/2 (Italy, 1963). Or you marvel at Oliver Stone’s adroit command of French at his Le Leçon de cinéma, the festival’s annual "film master class." Or you relive a moment of Cannes history at a Soirée in memory of the late French producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier in the Salle Debussy, where a large French film delegation turned up for a special screening of Maurice Pialat’s Sous le Soleil de Satan, the 1987 Palme d’Or winner produced by Toscan du Plantier. That moment of nostalgia counted, for I remember all too well that cacophony of boos and cheers that greeted Pialat when he walked onstage to defiantly hold his palm in the air for all to see.

For many, the flight from a rather mediocre competition led to the Salle Buñuel under the roof of the Palais des Festivals to relish the visual delights of "Restored Films, Rescued Films" in a new festival section. A windfall for the cineaste, the series embraced a cross-section of genres, styles, periods, and cinematographies. Topping the list were: Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (France, 1929), Jean Renoir’s Les Marseillaise (France, 1938), Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (USA, 1945), the director’s cut of Alberto Lattuada’s I dolci inganni (The Adolescents) (Italy, 1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangel secondo Matteo (Italy, 1964), and Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood (USA, 1967). I spent an evening with my youth at the screening of a stunning black-and-white print of In Cold Blood, adapted from Truman Capote’s bestseller with the versatile Scott Wilson in his first major screen role.

COMPETITION

Elephant - Dogville - The Swimming Pool - Uzak - Les invasions barbares - Ce jour-là - Purple Butterfly - Father and Son - At Five in the Afternoon

Columbine Revisited: Gus van Sant’s Elephant

Gus van Sant’s Elephant (USA) was the surprise winner of this year’s Golden Palm. The HBO telefeature, remarkable mostly for its cast of non-professional high-school teenagers, might not have gotten this far in the Cannes annals had it not been for Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, the documentary hit at the previous festival. Again, we are back in a suburban high school on an idyllic autumn day. Van Sant’s digital camera picks up details, sometimes repeating scenes from different angles and perspectives. We pass boys in a game of touch football, overhear girls in a corridor exchanging back-biting barbs, wander in and out of classrooms, pay visits to the cafeteria and library. It’s a day like any other at Watt High, an sprawling high school complex in Suburbia, USA - save that this one is about to explode when a couple of callow youths return home to open their mail-order delivery of guns and ammunition, don military combat uniforms, and return for their rendezvous with destiny on the school battlefield.

Regardless of whether Elephant will be graced with a cinematic release in the United States (the decision apparently lies with HBO), the film was doubly honored at Cannes with awards for Best Film and Best Director, a jury decision that effectively closed the gap between film and maker. Two more double-awards were to follow, which also says something about this year’s International Jury at Cannes, headed by President Patrice Chéreau.

Potholes at Grover’s Corners: Lars von Trier’s Dogville

Lars von Trier’s Dogville (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany/UK), a costly digitally shot entry running at three hours, came away empty-handed at Cannes - although, throughout the festival, it was the day-to-day favorite of voting critics. Fascinating only as a cinematic experiment, Dogville bears an uncanny, turned-inside-out resemblance to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, his 1938 stage classic set in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire - or "In the Mind of God," as Wilder referred to this rural community. Filmed entirely inside an abandoned Swedish machine factory, with the streets and buildings painted on a black-lacquered floor to point directions and help trigger your imagination, Dogville shows the seamy side of small-town morality, the hidden evil lurking beneath the surface of this isolated Godville community in the Rockies.

But once you get the point midway through the film - when Grace (Nicole Kidman), the mysterious lady in a worn evening gown on the run from gangsters, gets raped by Chuck (Stellan Skarsgard), the grubby farmer, and Thomas Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), the young idealist, does nothing about it - the last hour is suffocating. Grace, enchained as the town slave and prostitute, awaits her liberation by the gangster don (James Caan), then hardly blink an eye as she takes her revenge in a bloodbath. Is Dogville a brazen attack on Godville, the American Way of Life? Hardly - Gus van Sant’s Elephant kicked harder. An acting tour-de-force? The talents of Lauren Bacall and Ben Gazzara, and many others, are wasted on banal and colorless dialogue. An aesthetic dogma statement? Say what you will about von Trier’s hand-held digital-shooting principles, a wobbling camera is still a wobbling camera.

French Eroticism: François Ozon’s The Swimming Pool

"I don’t know if he likes women," said Catherine Deneuve about François Ozon, "but he does like actresses." Evidently two of his favorites are Ludivine Sagnier and Charlotte Rampling. Sagnier appeared in Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlants (Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 1999), a screen adaptation of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s claustrophobic melodrama, and 8 Femmes (8 Women, 2001), a whodunnit conceived loosely along the lines of George Cukor’s The Women (USA, 1939). Rampling played the imperturbable English lecturer in Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000), a stylish psychogram of a deranged woman in communion with her dead husband. The mystery drama prompted some critics to peg François Ozon as the second François Truffaut. Now Sagnier and Rampling appear together for the first time in The Swimming Pool, the most alluring of the nine films by French directors in the Sélection Officielle at Cannes.

Charlotte Rampling picks up where she left off in Under the Sand. This time, in a similar tale of repressed eroticism, she’s Sarah Morton, an icy British mystery writer who has lost her creative writing touch. When her publisher sends her to his villa in the Provence for a rest, he doesn’t inform her that she might be visited by his French daughter, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), whose loose morals and overheated sexual drives are enough to upset any writer’s retreat. At first repulsed, then fascinated by her guest, Sarah begins to spy on Julie as she lies languidly next to the swimming pool during the day after a nightly sexual bout. And her writing skills are gradually rekindled when she reads pages from Julie’s secret diary. The twist comes when Sarah and Julie find themselves with a murder caper on their hands - enough material in the end to assure the publication of another crime bestseller by the rejuvenated Sarah Morton. The Swimming Pool is François Ozon’s best film to date.

Time Trilogy: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak

The best film of the festival? It came from Turkey: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (Distant). Arriving in Cannes a month after the Istanbul film festival, where it had received three major awards: Best Turkish Film, Best Turkish Director, and International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize. Distant, another double-winner at Cannes, was awarded the runnerup Grand Jury Prize. Also, Muzaffer Özdemir and Mehmet Emin Toprak were jointly awarded the Best Actor Prize - for which jury president Patrice Chéreau had to request special festival permission in view of the fact that Toprak had recently died in a tragic car accident.

Distant is the third film in a Ceylan trilogy about the natural passage of time within predetermined space, about the solitude of the country giving way to loneliness of the city, about traditional family values bartered at a price for urban modernity. The unemployed young man (Mehmet Emin Toprak) from a village who pays his photographer cousin (Muzaffer Özdemir) a visit in Istanbul, in hopes of finding a job on a ship in the harbor, is the same young man at the end of Mayis Sikintisi (Clouds of May) (1999) who approaches the documentary filmmaker about the possibility of coming to Istanbul. And that idyllic rural community in Clouds of May is the same village Ceylan had sketched in misty, nostalgic, impressionistic nostalgic images in Kasaba (The Small Town) (1997).

The Small Town, shot in black-and-white, is an impressionistic portrait of family life in an isolated village that’s remarkable for its misty images, as though the entire film is the director’s own nostalgic dream of times past. It was awarded the festival’s Caligari Prize and receive a Special Mention in the Prix de Montreal competition for new directors at the 1998 Montreal World Film Festival.

In Clouds of May Ceylan probes the psyche of a documentary filmmaker - again an autobiographical trait - whose next production project takes him from Istanbul to the Anatolian village of his birth. The filmmaker’s concern for the own project, however, prevents him from appreciating the rather obscure distress of his father, who needs his son to help validate his legal claim to a piece of land on which he has already built a house. As the title hints, Clouds of May leaves us with images reminiscent of Turner’s landscape paintings: the peace of a idyllic wooded retreat and the languid beauty of a summer evening, to which are added the faces of people reflecting their deep roots in the rhythms and traditions of a rural community.

Distant picks up where Clouds of May left off. The rural cousin in Clouds of May who asks the filmmaker to help him find a job in the city is the same young man who comes knocking of photographer’s door in Distant. Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a photographer in his mid-forties and divorced, lives a quiet, unassuming, well-ordered existence in a tiny but tidy Istanbul flat. For all practical purposes, he has turned away from the outside world to nurture an inner life of calm with simple daily rituals, a self-imposed exile he has freely chosen (or so he thinks) to concentrate on his work and preoccupations. Each day, he goes to at the same bar at the same time to order the same beer. And when he feels the need for sex, a woman comes and departs without saying a word.

Into this closed world comes his cousin from the country: Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak), in his mid-twenties and unemployed after the factory in the area had closed down. Yusuf is hoping to find a job on the docks, then board a ship as a sailor "to see the world and get paid for it too." At first, Yusuf is impressed with Mahmut’s style of living, although the house restrictions allows him to smoke only in the kitchen. But day after day during a dreary winter, with time on his hands and nothing really to talk about to a man who doesn’t like to communicate anyway, Yusuf gives up the search for a job and a woman - and reluctantly decides to return home.

Yet this is only part of the story. The theme of Distant is found in its title: the slow passage of time, a space giving way to nothingness, a relationship that dies on the vine, a void that is never filled with anything meaningful, a life eventually felt (and experienced by the audience) for what it is: barren and colorless. Twice, given by Ceylan as a frame of aesthetic reference, we see Mahmut viewing a videotape of a Tarkovsky film.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan is an auteur in the fullest sense of that jaded filmmaking term. He handles every phase of production: producer ("NBC Film" refers, or course, to the initials of his name), screenwriter, director, cameraman, set designer, co-editor. In Uzak the image is the whole film.

A Prophecy Fulfilled: Denys Arcand’s Les invasions barbares

"I wrote this script over the last two years," said Denys Arcand in a statement about the making of Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (Canada). "The subject had been haunting me for a long time, but I never seemed to find an approach that felt right to me. It always ended up in bleak, depressing scripts. One day, it dawned on me I should reunite the cast of wonderfully odd characters in Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire) (1987). Their sense of humor, their cynicism, and their wits would breathe in the lightness I was aspiring to. It so happened all the actors were ready and willing to embark on a new venture. Obviously, with the passing of time, the mood was now darker and the inevitable, closer. It was time to take stock."

The third double-award winner at Cannes - after Gus van Sant’s Elephant and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Distant - Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions is the sequel to the director’s Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire), a festival legend programmed 17 years ago at Cannes in the Directors Fortnight. If Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire has proved prophetic - and it has! - then his Barbarian Invasions scores as the best cinematic response to date to the "9/11" trauma. The same cast of wonderfully odd characters are back - all rebels in their own right, each with a hearty cynicism and a ribald wit to match. Denys Arcand was awarded Best Screenplay. Marie-Josée Croze as Nathalie, the young wayward daughter of one of the group who fights off a drug habit, was awarded Best Actress.

As the story goes, Gilles Jacob had his qualms about showing The Decline of the American Empire in the Competition at the 1986 Cannes festival. He waited until the last minute to reject it - whereupon Pierre-Henri Deleau booked it immediately to open the Directors Fortnight. It proved to be the sensation of the festival. Later, Jacob apologized personally to Arcand for the oversight, suggesting to him that the doors to the Sélection Officielle would be open for his next film. Arcand did, indeed, return three years later with Jesus de Montreal, awarded the Prix de Jury and the Ecumenical Prize at the 1989 Cannes festival.

Looking back, one cannot deny that The Decline of the American Empire has proven prophetic. It was, and remains, a harsh critique of the American "Way of Life" - hinting in assorted conversations among the protagonists, mostly intellectuals, that the social and cultural seams in (North) America had split asunder, and that another civilization crash like the one recounted in Gibbons’s "The Fall of the Roman Empire" was imminent. Awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize, it went on to become Canada’s biggest success on the world film scene: an Academy Award Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, nine Genie Awards (Canadian Oscars), the Quebec Film Critics Award, and several more international film awards.

Denys Arcand, born 1941 in Montreal, is one of the finest directorial talents to emerge from the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Shortly after joining the NFB, he made Cotton Mill, Trademill (1970), a documentary about abuses in the Quebec textile industry. It was officially banned for six years because of its allegedly biased point of view. Equally controversial was his Quebec: Duplessis and After (1972), another politically-orientated documentary dealing with the political aftermath of Quebec ex-Prime Minister, Maurice Duplessis.

Leaving the NFB, Arcand directed his first fiction feature, Dirty Money (1972). A thriller about theft and murder with a pronounced ironic touch, it was invited to the International Week of the Critics at the 1972 Cannes festival. The next year, he was back in Cannes again with Rejeanne Padovanni (1973), selected by Directors’ Fortnight and invited to the New York Film Festival. Other critical and commercial hits followed, among them The Crime of Ovide Plouffe (1974), which broke a box-office record in Quebec, and The Decline of the American Empire (1987), his breakthrough film. He was back in Cannes in 2000, closing the festival with Stardom, a satire on fame. All of Denys Arcand’s films show his deep passion for history and characters from different social backgrounds.

In The Barbarian Invasions Rémy (Rémy Girard), divorced and in his early fifties, has been hospitalized with a serious illness. His ex-wife, Louise (Dorothée Berryman), asks their son Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau) to return home from London to visit him. Sébastien hesitates; for he and his father never had much to say to each other, but he decides to fly to Montreal to help out his mother. As soon as he arrives, Sébastien reunites the "merry band" that had marked Rémy’s past, and they gather around his father’s bedside: relatives, friends, former mistresses. Among these is Nathalie (Marie-Josée Croze), the daughter of one of Rémy’s former lovers, who plays a key role in the final deathbed scene.

What has become of these old rebels after an absence of nearly two decades? The old irreverences, the friendships spiced with belligerence, are still there. Humor, hedonism, desire still haunt their dreams. And their viewpoints on the American Way of Life, so much a part of the Canadian life style, are the same as that of Denys Arcand: "The American Empire is the world absolute ruler. As such, it will have to constantly push back the stream of barbarian attacks. Nine-eleven was the first that succeeded to strike at the Empire’s heart, the first of many more to come …"

One Absurd Day: Raoul Ruiz’s Ce jour-là

"Is Raoul Ruiz a descendent of Breton, Aragon, Dali, Buñuel, Éluard? Yes, I sincerely think so," said French actress Elsa Zylberstein on the set of Ce jour-là (That Day), a French-Swiss coproduction marking the Chilean-born director’s 10th appearance at Cannes and the fifth time in the Sélection Officielle. "He has a gift to mix everything up: a joie de vivre, an originality, a lunacy, an irony, an immense lucidity." Paulo Branco, an admiring support of the director, is producing again. And Raoul’s wife, Valéria Sarmiento, a filmmaker in her own right, has edited the film.

Raoul (Raúl is the Spanish spelling) Ruiz is a regular at Cannes. Last year, he served on the International Jury. Two years ago, he closed the 2001 Cannes festival with Les ames fortes (Savage Souls), the story of a wild young girl from the provinces who runs away from her conniving boyfriend - John Malkovich in one of his better roles for foreign directors - to take refuge at the manor of a rich woman just as savage in her own way as she is. And, in 1999, Ruiz stopped traffic on the Croisette when his Marcel Proust adaptation, Le temps retrouvé (Time Regained), starring Catherine Deneuve as the demi-mondaine Odette de Crécy and John Malkovich as the loony Baron de Carlus, was programmed on a Sunday afternoon during a holiday weekend.

As for his two other competition entries at Cannes, Ruiz’s Trois vies et une seule mort (Three Lives and Only One Death) (1996), a French-Chilean coproduction, is a weird tale of entangled stories that keep crossing paths in what the director declares is an attempt at structural cubism in cinema. And his L’oeil qui ment (Dark Noon) (1992), another French-Chilean coproduction, is an avant-garde tale set in Paris at the end of the First World War that stars John Hurt as a doctor-researcher who specializes in unexplained medical recoveries bordering on miracles.

Born in 1941 in Puerto Montt, Chile, as the son of a ship’s captain, Raúl Ruiz studied law and theology at the University of Chile, learned the fundamentals of filmmaking in Argentina, penned a series of stage plays for avant-garde theatres in Santiago, and worked as both writer and technician for TV stations in Chile and Mexico. With money borrowed from family and friends, he directed his first feature film, Tres tristes tigres (Three Sad Tigers) (1968), a subtle exposé of the Chilean middle-class, and was awarded the Golden Leopard at Locarno. Six years later, following the Allende coup in 1973, he arrived in Paris as a political exile with a print of La expropriacion (Expropriation) (1974) under his arm - and was immediately invited by Pierre-Henri Deleau to show the film at the 1974 Directors Fortnight at Cannes.

A prolific filmmaker, Raoul Ruiz has directed in the neighborhood of 75 films over the past 30 years. And like Luis Buñuel before him, he feels at home in just about any genre - provided he is allowed by his producer to add an ironic or absurd or humorous twist to an otherwise bold narrative line. His innovative use of decor, lighting, and camera techniques have earned him the favor of the French and European avant-garde. Also, his intellectual esprit and playful approach to cinema have gained the respect of well known screen personalities, actors who enjoy working for and will go out of the way to collaborate on a project with him. Catherine Deneuve starred in his Dostoyevsky-like spoof of Freudian psychoanalysis, Généologies d’un crime (Genealogy of a Crime ) (1996), awarded a Silver Bear at the 1997 Berlinale. William Baldwin appeared in Shattered Image (1998), and Isabelle Huppert could be seen in Comedy of Innocence (2000).

Ruiz’s French productions were programmed regularly at Cannes in the Perspectives of French Cinema section: The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978), Manuel’s Destinies (1985), and Richard III (1986). Then came another breakthrough of sorts at Cannes when his L’île au trésor (Treasure Island) (1991) was invited to Un Certain Regard in 1991. Treasure Island, the story of a perverse children’s game of chance and guessing that pushes adult participants to their rational limits, was the forerunner of Combat d’amour en songe (Chilean Rhapsody) (2000), a Chilean-Portuguese-French coproduction. A make-believe fairy tale about a treasure hunt starring Elsa Zylberstein and Lambert Wilson, Chilean Rhapsody was invited to compete at the Montreal World Film Festival and was awarded there the FIPRESCI Prize,

Elsa Zylberstein and Raoul Ruiz collaborated again on Ce jour-là, a French-Swiss coproduction. She plays young, beautiful Livia, the sole heiress of an immense fortune, who lives alone on a large Swiss estate and is envied by the rest of the family. The spiteful sycophants hire Emil (Bernard Giraudeau), a diabetic contract killer just released from an asylum, to stalk and kill her. But once Emil and Livia meet on "that day," they become good friends. The wheel of fortune turns - and the plotters become the victims.

Resistance in Shanghai: Ye Lou’s Purple Butterfly

"This is a story that took place in Shanghai more than 70 years ago, in the early 1930s of the last century," said YE Lou (Lou Ye) in a director’s statement about Purple Butterfly (China). "But when you try to return to those days - to make a movie or tell a story - you quickly discover that nothing much has changed. The people in that period faced more or less the problems we face today. Our lives are still chaotic, still hard to grasp or control."

Shanghai, once the "Pearl of the Orient," was a turbulent city during the 1930s - literally the crossroads of the world. Hundreds of Germans fleeing Hitler’s suppression of Jews and intellectuals landed here, simply because they didn’t need a visa to get into this open seaport city. It was a center for the opium trade. The "International Settlement" was noted for its banks and hotels, its gambling clubs and houses of pleasure. The enclaves were havens of British and western cultural life. Old Chinese customs clashed with alien modern dress and ways. Artists and entrepreneurs, thieves and conmen, adventurers and fortune-seekers, carefree globetrotters and exiled monarchs rubbed shoulders with each other. They came and went or stayed. Some stayed too long - and found themselves stranded. It was the last stop for tired wealthy travellers and desperate refugees from Europe. Japanese businessmen and diplomats waited for their moment of destiny: the Japanese invasion was about to begin.

As a frame of reference, try Vicki Baum’s novel, Hotel Shanghai, brought to the screen by the late Berlin producer Manfred Durniok. Set in 1937 in the majestic Cathay Hotel, it takes the pulse of a time when the ebb and flow of diplomatic intrigue and complex human relationships had reached its high point. Ten years in the making and completed in 1996, Hotel Shanghai was at that time the most costly Chinese production on record with a European producer. Directed by Peter Patzak and shot on actual Shanghai locations, with an international cast and 4,000 Chinese extras, it cost an estimated $8.5 million. The Chinese art director was the celebrated Qin Baison, who had collaborated with Zhang Yimou on his award-winning Chinese epics.

Purple Butterfly opens in 1928 in Shanghai. Itami (Toru Nakmura), a young Japanese, falls in love with Cynthia (Zhang Ziyi), a Chinese girl, who later changes her name to Ding Hui. Their brief tryst ends when Itami is called home for his military service. Upon returning home from the train station, she witnesses the murder of her brother by Japanese right-wing extremists. Three years later, with Shanghai "unofficially" occupied by the Japanese through acts of terror and violence, the city is tense and about to explode. Ding Hui has joined the "Purple Butterfly," a Chinese resistance group planning to assassinate Yamamoto, the head of the Japanese secret service. Itami is also back in Shanghai, operating as a secret agent reporting directly to Yamamoto. When Szeto (Liu Ye), a young Chinese, is mistaken for the hired Yamamoto assassin, a gunfight erupts in the Shanghai Station - and Szeto’s fiancee is accidentally killed. Szeto now joins the Purple Butterfly too. The fates of three young people - Ding Hui, Szeto, Itami - are interlinked and predestined to tragedy.

Born 1965 in Shanghai, Lou Ye graduated in 1989 from the Beijing Film Academy. After making several short films, he directed the feature Weekend Lover (1993), awarded the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Prize for Best Director at the Mannheim-Heidelberg film festival. His second feature, Suzhou River (1998), a metaphorical statement remarkable for its broken time frames, was shot illegally in Shanghai without receiving script approval from the authorities. Further, Ye had also coproduced the film. Suzhou River received the Tiger Award at the 2000 Rotterdam film festival. A director with style and vision, Ye’s talent is on full display in Purple Butterfly, an epic tale of doomed passions, mistaken identities, political intrigue, with a narrative line along the lines of a Leone western.

Spiritual Elegy: Alexander Sokurov’s Father and Son

Most Russian critics had nothing but praise for Alexander Sokurov’s cycle of short poetic "elegies" on people and places in Russia and the ex-Soviet Union. Altogether, they number seven to date: Elegy (1985), Moscow Elegy (1987/88), Soviet Elegy (1989), St. Petersburg Elegy (1989), Simple Elegy (1990), Russian Elegy (1992), and Oriental Elegy (1996). Sokurov’s first feature-length "spiritual elegy was Mat i syn (Mother and Son) (1997), a poetic film that breathed the same spirituality as found in the previous elegies. And it is an elegy in the truest sense. Indeed, Mother and Son is a haunting, 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. Programmed by the International Forum of Young Cinema at the 1998 Berlinale, it also confirmed Sokurov as one of Russia’s leading filmmakers.

Moreover, Mother and Son provided the appropriate stylistic design and striking visual imagery for Moloch (1999), Sokurov’s first Cannes entry. A contentious Russian-German coproduction about a day in the life of Eva Braun, originally titled The Mystery of the Mountain, Moloch is about a day in the lives of Eva and Adolf atop the Fuehrer’s Alpine retreat in Berchtesgaden in the late spring of 1942, a couple of months before the German defeat at Stalingrad. In this film Sokurov approached his subjects from a dream-like distance by filtering the images through a brownish gauze or optic veil. Taurus (2000), his second Cannes entry, again challenged critics and historians with a controversial account of Lenin’s Last Days, the film’s other given title. Again, Sokurov filmed the action through a green-greyish filter to emphasize the fictionally exaggerated, almost nightmarish, dimension of the theme. Russian Ark (2002), his third Cannes entry, was a one-shot, HD Steadicam, digital-25p masterpiece that falls a bit out of the pale of the director’s stylistic vision. Filmed in the 35 rooms of the Hermitage and the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg, it embraced 400 years of Russian history and cultural life. This exercise in digital shooting also prepared the way for the concept and shooting of Otets i syn (Father and Son), Sokurov’s fourth Cannes entry in five years.

As the title hints, Father and Son is the natural analogue to Mother and Son, a spiritual elegy mourning again the death of a woman and mother - in this case, the father’s dead wife as seen, and revisited in a dream sequence, in the persona of the son. As usual in a Sokurov film, the approach is hermetic and, one might say in this instance, homoerotic. But Father and Son is anything but a homosexual statement, nor is it the director’s "coming-out" film. Rather, the attraction of the father for the presence of the son, spiritually as well as physically, is filtered through illuminating sepia-tone hues as though the entire film was shot in blazing sunshine. Set mostly atop connecting roofs in the city of Lisbon, with glimpses of the sea in the distance, these scenes are augmented in turn by the father’s past as an army general and the son’s stay in a military academy. That Father and Son is a spiritual elegy anchored to Russian Orthodox belief is attested by repeated sentences spoken to each other by the pair: "A son who loves his father will sacrifice himself for him. A father who loves his son will crucify him." Father and Son, the second film in a planned trilogy, was awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at Cannes.

It’s worth noting, too, that all of Sokurov’s Cannes entries have been cofinanced by German producers, a happenstance that has raised eyebrows on more than one occasion. Before Moloch - originally titled The Mystery of the Mountain before its Cannes screening - some critics shook their heads over the very boldness of the project. For a film about Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler directed by a Russian with Russian actors speaking dubbed German sounded rather implausible, to say the least. But Alexander Sokurov is not an ordinary Russian director. Among his 30 plus credits as a director is a 10-minute montage-documentary titled Sonata for Hitler (1979), made 20 years ago. On the making of Moloch he offered these comments: "These people, the people of power, turned their lives into theatre. Guided by a myth, they conceived and modified their lives, staged real mise en scène and subordinated their behavior to rituals and ceremonies. This pattern is by no means unique, and Hitler was not exceptional. It’s a common occurrence that grandiose shows driven by vanity end up in the dustbin of history."

The "dustbin of history" aptly describes Lenin’s last days in Taurus as well. Sokurov depicts the great leader at his estate as a tired, restless old man out of sync with history and the revolution forces he had once set in motion. Crippled by a stroke, he feels himself over-protected by his wife and women relatives as he waits in vain for an "important phone call" from the Central Committee in Moscow. Finally, an eery Josef Stalin appears on the scene - he’s there to check out Lenin’s health, not to confer with his mentor and on the state of world events. That one scene says more about the myths of contemporary Russian history than a score of enlightening books on the subject. No wonder some leftist critics were up in arms at Cannes!

Of the three Russian stylists once named as "rightful heirs" to the art cinema of 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 ways 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. Add to this the disturbing news that he is gradually losing his eyesight, and respect and admiration for his visual style of "filming through a veil" can hardly be denied.

Born in Siberia into a military family that was always on the move, this background helps to fathom some of the hidden associations in Father and Son. Sokurov spent his childhood in Poland, his youth in Turkistan, 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.

Makhmalbaf Film House: Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon

Email the Makhmalbaf Film House in Tehran (makhmalbaf.film@tavana.net), and you’ll usually get back the latest bunch of interviews, critiques, filmographies about all the key members of this remarkable family. Once, I even downloaded a 50-page treatise on why Mohsen Makhmalbaf had risked his life to shoot Kandahar, his 2001 Cannes festival entry, in the camps of starving Afghani refugees just over the Iranian border. That year, there was also the occasion of the Samira Makhmalbaf photo exhibition at Cannes. And, by the way, Samira served on the Short Film and Cinéfondation Jury at the 2001 Cannes festival.

Keeping up with the Makhmalbaf film-family tree - father Mohsen Makhmalbaf, mother Merziyeh Meshkini, daughter Samira, son Maysam, and another daughter Hana - has become a must for critics, festival directors, and cineastes deep into Iranian and Far East cinema. Their regular presence at key international film festivals - Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Locarno - was capped at the 2000 Pusan International Film Festival with a "Salaam Cinema! Films of the Makhmalbaf Family" retrospective, where it caught the eye of Kiril Masgalov, artistic director of the Moscow festival, who promptly book it for his own 2001 event. In addition to the dozen films in the Moscow tribute, there was time set aside for an in-depth "conversation" with Mohsen Makhmalbaf on his literary output: novels, short stories, journalist tracts, theses on Islamic art and theatre, and more. But the tribute hit a snag, when the Russian government apparently failed to issue the necessary visas in time for the entire Makhmalbaf family.

With some 25 shorts, documentaries, and features to his name, Mohsen Makhmalbaf is recognized at home and abroad as an authentic film revolutionary. Born 1957 in Tehran, he was thrown into prison at 17 for five years for resisting the Shah regime. Set free after the revolution, he published a novel, several short stories, and directed his first film, Nosuh’s Repentance (1982). With the success of his neorealist The Pedlar (1987) and The Cyclist (1988), the latter about an Afghani refugee in Iran and the forerunner of Kandahar, Makhmalbaf found himself increasingly in conflict with Islamic authorities. His Time of Love (1990), programmed in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, was banned for "deviant religious views" at home.

Thereafter, Mohsen Makhmalbaf became a regular at Cannes: Salaam Cinema (1995), Gabbeh (1996), The Door episode in Kish Tales (1999), and Kandahar (2001). But he also premiered A Moment of Innocence (1996) at Locarno and competed at Venice with The Silence (1998). In addition, he wrote the scripts for Samira Makhmalbaf’s The Apple (1998), the debut feature of his 18-year-old daughter selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes, followed by Blackboards (2000), awarded the Prix de Jury at Cannes. And he wrote the script for Merziyeh Meshkini’s The Day I Became a Woman (2000), his wife’s awarded Venice entry. The best illustration on how the family members are interlinked on mutual productions can be found in Maysam Makhmalbaf’s How Samira Made Blackboards (2000), a brother’s view of why his sister left school to work as an assistant for their father and learn firsthand the art of cinema and the craft of filmmaking.

At 18, Samira Makhmalbaf is the youngest director ever to present a feature film in the Sélection Officielle at Cannes. Moreover, The Apple, her Certain Regard entry at the 1998 Cannes festival, was not only scripted but edited by her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Indeed, Samira has followed in the sure footsteps of her father to Cannes. Remember Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Time of Love (1991)? It had eventually to be cleared by the Iranian censors for a Certain Regard screening at the 1995 Cannes festival. And his Salaam, Cinema, a docu-drama invited to Cannes for the 1998 "Centennial of Cinema" celebration - not by coincidence, the same year as his daughter’s The Apple - mirrored the consuming desire of many Iranian women to be in films. And like her father, Samira Makhmalbaf approaches filmmaking as a moral medium, one of search and reflection, one in which the director’s primary focus should be on human dignity - and, if necessary, on the dark side of human behavior. As a seven-year-old, she had her own first experience before the camera: acting in Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Cyclist (1989). At 16, she took her first courses in filmmaking, later shot two shorts, and still found time to assist her father on the set.

In The Apple, the original point of departure was an ordinary street in a poor district of Tehran. Several families had written to the Social Services Office about a father who had locked up his two young daughters since birth. When a social worker called on the family, the father responded: "My daughters are like flowers - expose them to the sun, and they will wither away!" The moral quest for answers prodded Samira Makhmalbaf to go further: "I wanted to discover who had forced the parents, despite their love, to lock up their own children. And I wanted to know why some neighbors chose to ignore the affair, and even remain indifferent, for such a long time …"

In Pan é asr (At Five in the Afternoon), Samira Makhmalbaf picks up where her father had left off in Safar e Gandehar (The Road to Kandahar). Both are Iranian-French coproductions. A Competition entry at the 2001 Cannes festival, Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s The Road to Kandahar, photographed by talented Iranian cameraman Ebrahim Ghafori, was promoted in advance via the homepage of the Makhmalbaf Film House with well researched documentation on why "The Buddha Was Not Demolished in Afghanistan - It Collapsed Out of Shame." In other words, Mohsen Makhmalbaf wanted to make sure the viewer didn’t miss the point when he went to see Kandahar. For although Kandahar was researched in the refugee camps of neighboring countries near the Afghani borders, some of the footage was apparently shot at refugee sites within Afghanistan as well.

Kandahar evoked sympathy for the plight of Afghani refugees living abroad. When Nafas, a young Afghani journalist who had 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 hurries back to Kandahar to save her sister from committing suicide. She tries to enter Afghanistan by the way she had previously exited the country - via the Niatak refugee camp at the Iran-Afghanistan border. It’s here that the film really begins - and ends.

In Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon, also photographed by Ebrahim Ghafori, Afghani refugees have crossed the borders from Iran and Pakistan to return to the former homes in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Among these is a young woman, Nogreh (Agheleh Rezaïe), who returns to Kabul accompanied by her father and mother. Sent to a religious school in her blue burqa, Nogreh slips away "at five in the afternoon" to discard her head-covering and don a pair of high-heeled shoes. She wants to hear the music long forbidden by Taliban rules. And she wants to breathe the fresh air of a liberated society. When she meets a poet in the streets, she proclaims her secret desire to become the "president of the country." Meanwhile, her father, steeped in religious ways and traditions, is horrified at the "blasphemy" he encounters in Kabul - particularly the appearance of unveiled women in the streets. Finally, he can stand no more. Together with his family, which now includes the sick baby of his step-daughter, he flees into the desert. At Five in the Afternoon was awarded the Prix de Jury and the Ecumenical Prize.

But the story of the Makhmalbaf Film House doesn’t end there. While Iranian cameraman Ebrahim Ghafori was working with Samira Makhmalbaf on At Five in the Afternoon in Afghanistan, he met Afghani director Sedigh Barmak, who asked him to shoot Osama, the first Afghani feature film made in the country since the war. Due largely to his collaborative support, Osama received a Special Mention by the Caméra d’Or Jury.

UN CERTAIN REGARD

Mille mois (Morocco/France/Belgium) - En jouant "Dans la compagnie des hommes" (France) - September (Germany) -  Robinson’s Crusoe (Taiwan) - Arimpara (India/UK/Japan) - Talaye sorgh (Iran) - Drifters (Taiwan)

Mille mois (A Thousand Months) (Morocco/France/Belgium), Faouzi Bensaidi

"The film opens in a precise religious and political setting, the start of the month of Ramadan in Morocco in 1981," according to Faouzi Bensaidi, whose debut feature Mille Mois (A Thousand Months) is contending for the Caméra d’Or. "I do not wish to deal with history directly but in a roundabout way, through its traces and after-effects on the lives of people who do not see it occurring because they are caught up in a present where no holds are barred in the fight to survive … like a distant war whose wounded you would only see if they lived in the neighborhood. In other words, an intimate form of history."

In A Thousand Months Amina (Nezha Rahil) arrives in a village in the Atlas Mountains with her 7-year-old son Mehdi (Fouad Labied). Mehdi’s father is in prison, but the boy is made to believe that he has gone to work in France. His mother and grandfather decide to keep this illusion of hope alive for the boy’s sake. As for Mehdi himself, he has been given the job of watching over the chair of the teacher at school, of which he is very proud. This object also influences his relationship with his friends in the village. But the fragile balance between truth and illusion threatens to explode every day during this holy month. "Religion is very present in the film," said Bensaidi. "but it only interests me in its imaginary dimension to grasp its place in the daily lives of the characters, the formation of their personality and their relationship with the world."

Born 1967 in Meknes, Morocco, Bensaidi trained as an actor at the Paris National Higher Academy of Dramatic Art. His first short film, The Cliff (1997) was awarded several prizes at festivals in France and abroad. Two more short films followed: The Wall (2000), awarded at Cannes, and The Rain Line (2000), awarded at Venice. He now spends his time between Paris and Casablanca.

En jouant "Dans la compagnie des hommes" (Playing "In the Company of Men") (France), Arnaud Displechin

Critically acclaimed - along with Luc Besson, Leos Carax, Claire Denis, and Olivier Assayas - as one of the key directors in the latest French New Wave, Arnaud Desplechin is opening the Un Certain Regard section with Playing "In the Company of Men" - a screen adaptation of Edward Bond’s blistering play about the iniquity of boardroom power games. Published in 1989 and first staged at Avignon in 1992, Bond’s In the Company of Men appears, in Desplechin’s view, to have grown in importance today as a scathing attack on sweeping corruption at stock exchanges and business centers the world over. "To start off, this is a play by the most Shakespearean of contemporary British playwrights," said Desplechin in a press release. "It scrutinizes the dark corridors of power … There is no guilty party, just a few powerful men working in the shadows, who make the world a jungle."

The interesting factor in Playing "In the Company of Men" is Desplechin’s approach to filming an ensemble of actors as they, in turn, set about to stage a play - much as Louis Malle did in Vanya on 42nd Street (1994), when he "rehearsed on film" an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with a troupe in modern dress at the old rundown New Amsterdam Theater in Manhattan. "Formally the film has chosen not to hide its theatrical aspect, nor the way it was made," say Desplechin. The idea was: "rehearsing with the actors, shot on video, and then playing sequences in natural décors, shot on 35mm." And the reason for this aesthetic principle? "The film thus profits from different speeds, from sudden accelerations and enormous jumps in time, all characteristic of B-movies."

Born 1960 in Roubaix, Arnaud Desplechin graduated from IDHEC in 1984, worked as a cameraman for Eric Rochant and Nico Papatakis, then debuted in the International Week of the Critics at Cannes in 1991 with the short feature La vie des morts. A treatise on suicide, it was awarded the Jean Vigo Prize for Best Short Film. A year later, he was invited to compete at Cannes with La Sentinelle (1992), about a German medical student on his way to study medicine in Paris, who is surprised on the train to discover a human head in his baggage. The Sentinel was awarded the Prix Georges Sadoul for Best First Feature Film. Two more invitations to compete at Cannes followed: My Sex Life … or How I Got Into an Argument (1996), his most commercially successful film, and Esther Kahn (2000), about a Jewish girl (Summer Phoenix) in pursuit of a theatrical career in 19th-century London. Shot in English, Esther Kahn paved the way for exploring a theatrical theme even further in Playing "In the Company of Men".

September (Germany), Max Färberböck

Born 1950 in Munich, Max Färberböck is known on home grounds mostly for his quality television production. Only on a few occasions has he ventured into film production for the cinemas. In 1998, he completed Aimée & Jaguar but held back the release until the 1999 Berlinale in February of the next year, when it premiered on opening night. Based on Erica Fischer’s book, it deals with a true-life lesbian relationship between the wife of a German soldier and a Jewess hiding in the Berlin underground during the critical years of 1943/44, when bombs were falling upon the city. Top acting performances by Juliane Köhler as Lilly Wurst, upon whose recollections the book and film are based, and Maria Schrader as Felice Schragenheim, who was in fact arrested by the Gestapo in August of 1944, earned Silver Bears for Best Actress for both Köhler and Schrader.

Aimée & Jaguar is an unusual love story on its own historical merits. However, one thematic component makes Aimée & Jaguar a standout: the desire of the protagonists - indeed, nearly all in the film - to try and forget the war by facing life squarely in the face and by accepting whatever comfort life’s simple pleasures could offer. The friends gather for parties. They enjoy a night out on the town. They plan an outing on Lake Havel on a warm summer day in August of 1944. Those scenes alone are what makes this exceptional "love story" more exceptional - along with such atmospheric production credits as sets, costumes, and realistic documentary touches. Maria Schrader as Felice and Juliane Köhler as Lilly were jointly awarded Silver Bears for Best Actresses at the Berlinale.

In September four "quite normal couples" reflect on how much 11 September 2001 has not only changed world history, but it has also altered their own lives in Germany. The film is set between 11 September 2001 and the American attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the four episodes eight people discuss how each experienced that fatal day and what its consequences were for him or her. Coming from different backgrounds, they meet casually by chance and find they have one thing in common: their emotions. Still, the inner turmoil released through the tragic event is different with each individual. Indeed, as Färberböck points out, being at the mercy of one’s emotions can lead to unpredictable behaviour.

Robinson’s Crusoe (Taiwan), LIN Cheng-Sheng (aka Cheng-Sheng Lin)

Born 1959 in Taidung, a remote village on the island of Taiwan, Lin Cheng-Sheng ran away from home at 16, settled in Taipei, and became a baker. Soon after entering a filmmaking workshop in 1986, he began making documentaries and shorts, produced and scripted together with his wife Ko Su-ching. His short film The Family Treasure won a government grant, thus paving the way to develop the short into his first feature A Drifting Life (1996). Of his six feature films to date, three have been invited to Cannes. Lin’s second feature, Murmur of Youth (1997), programmed in the Directors Fortnight, upgraded a previous documentary into an intimate docu-drama about two young girls. Both named Mei-li (meaning "Pretty"), but coming from different social backgrounds, they while away hours in the box-office of a Taipei cinema in a revealing give-and-take about families and fantasies.

Lin’s third feature, March of Happiness (1999), programmed in Un Certain Regard, sketched the aspirations of a young couple, an actress and a musician, during the immediate postwar years in a troubled Taiwan. It paved the way for an invitation to the Pusan Project Plan at the 1999 Pusan festival, where Lin pitched Betelnut Beauty and secured support for the project from Taiwan and French coproducers. The film premiered in the competition at the 2001 Berlinale and was awarded the Silver Bear for Best Director. Set in Taipei in mid-summer, Betelnut Beauty comes across as a poignant fiction-documentary about young people who can’t find their way. A young man fresh out of army service doesn’t want to return to his former job as a baker (Lin himself is an ex-baker), so he drifts into the illegal traffic of "betelnuts" (a cross between caffeine and marihuana) that’s sold to taxi and truck drivers. There he meets a new phenomenon in Taiwan: a "betelnut beauty," or a young street-walker wearing a scanty mini-skirt to attract customers. Before long, they are a couple whose relationship is doomed from the beginning, as they struggle to dodge the gangs, the police, and a pimp with an eye on the girl.

In Robinson’s Crusoe, programmed in Un Certain Regard, Robinson (Leon Dai), a good-looking single, sells luxury homes, but he can't seem to save enough to buy, or even rent, a house and settle down with his girlfriend. Living secretly in a designer hotel, he dreams of running away and starting a new life. He found the ideal place on the internet: Crusoe Island. "Robinson Crusoe deals with my own unexplainable life crisis," said Lin Cheng-sheng in a director’s statement. "Such a crisis does not involve any outward signs. The outside remains materialistically full and spiritually painless. But something’s just not right. Something is gone and may be irretrievably lost."

Arimpara (A Story That Begins at the End) (India/UK/Japan), Murali Nair

Arimpara (A Story That Begins at the End) marks the third occasion in six years that Kerala-born, London-based Murali Nair has been invited to present a film in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes. He won the Caméra d’Or for Best Debut Feature Film in 1999 for Murana Simhasanam (Throne of Death), a harsh critique of the first execution by electric chair of a poor thief from an impoverished island community. Krishnan and his family live on a small island that’s without water or electricity. Like most of the islanders, he is a seasonal worker who depends on odd jobs to feed his family. When he can’t find work, he steals a bunch of coconuts from his landlord, gets caught and is thrown in jail, where he is accused of a murder that happened on the island some years ago. Events get out of hand when politicians take up Krishnan’s cause to win votes.

Two years later, Murali Nair was back in Cannes with Pattiyude divasam (A Dog’s Day) (2001), set again in a rural provincial area of Kerala. Following India’s declaration of independence, a ruling lord decides to follow suit and grants his people the "gift" of democracy, which they then celebrate 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.

Social ethics and a corrupted moral code are also at the core of A Story That Begins at the End. Krishnanunni, a wealthy leader in a Kerala community with strong orthodox religious beliefs, awakes one morning to find a black mole under his lower lip. His wife takes its appearance as a sign of luck - until the mole begins to grow. Then, thinking it might be contagious, she demands that her husband undergo an operation, which Krishnanunni refuses on religious grounds. Eventually, the mold, or wart, or whatever it is, takes full control of his senses …

Talaye sorgh (Crimson Gold) (Iran), Jafar Panahi

"Abbas Kiarostami told me that he had read in the papers about a thief who was trapped by the security system in a jewelry store," said Jafar Panahi in a statement about Crimson Gold. "The man ended up killing the store manager and then committed suicide. I asked myself what could have pushed a human being to such extreme. Abbas wrote the screenplay with the intention that I open the narrative exactly on this point of being trapped, caught in a dead end. Then the film retraces the events leading up to this event."

Born 1960 in Mianeh, Iran, Jafar Panahi studied film directing at the Tehran College of Cinema and Television. He made several short films for TV and was the assistant director on Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees (1994). His first feature film, The White Balloon (1995), was awarded the Caméra d’Or at Cannes. His second feature, The Mirror (1997), was awarded the Golden Leopard at Locarno. And his third feature, The Circle (2000), was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice. Now he has been invited to close the Un Certain Regard with Crimson Gold. Seldom has a filmmaker bagged so many honors and major film awards in succession.

In Crimson Gold Hussein (Hussein Emadeddin) delivers pizzas to rich neighborhoods. When his friend Ali (Kamyar Sheissi) shows him the contents of a lost purse that contains a receipt for an expensive necklace, Hussein notes that his meagre salary could never afford such luxury. Later, when a man mistakes the two friends for petty thieves, and when they are kicked out of a jewelry shop simply because of their appearance, Hussein has had enough. He plans the robbery of the jewelry store …

Panahi: "Politics alone don’t interest me. But exploring the effects that political errors have on people is more the subject matter of my films … I expect the audience to be willing to reflect. For all my films my main focus is to tell the story honestly and objectively. I am not trying to preach a message. I’m searching … It’s up to the viewer to reflect and interpret on his or her own."

Drifters (Taiwan), WANG Xiaoshuai (aka Xiaoshuai Wang)

Xiaoshuai Wang, born 1966 in Shanghai, is an independent Chinese director of the so-called "Sixth Generation" to keep an eye on. Of the six feature films to his credit over the past decade, Days (1993) was held back briefly by the censors, while his third film, So Close to Paradise (1998), was shelved for three years because it focused on social dilemmas in contemporary China. In between, he made his second feature, Frozen (1996), the story of a performance artist who wants to stage his own suicide as a forceful political statement. It was directed under a pseudonym - and received the Tiger Award at Rotterdam. His next film, Shi qi sui de dan che (Beijing Bicycle), a Chinese-French coproduction supported through the Pusan Promotion Plan, was invited to compete at the 2001 Berlinale, where it was awarded the runnerup Special Jury Prize. At his Berlin press conference Wang gave no assurance that the film would be readily released in China.

In Beijing Bicycle Xiaoshuai Wang presents us with an unusual portrait of China and its teaming capital city. Two teenaged youths - one from a country village, the other from the urban working-class - aspire to higher opportunities. The country boy gets a job as a courier, for which he is given a uniform and a high-speed mountain bicycle to be paid for out of his salary. The other, a student at an elite school, badly needs a bicycle to boost his image with classmates, who cruise the neighborhood on bikes, but also to impress a girl. So the bike is stolen - and the story unravels to reveal much about different social classes in today’s China, from the poor to the upper-crust, until it ends on a brutal note.

It was not surprising that Wang chose to produce his latest film, Drifters, from a base in Taiwan. This is the story of Er Di, a kind of town celebrity because he has been caught twice as a stowaway on a ship. In fact, he once remained abroad for a number of years before he was caught and deported. Back home, he lives the life of a hang-around - until he meets Xiao Nu, another listless soul attached to the traveling Shanghai Opera troupe. A romance is on the wing, except that they don’t quite know where to go from here …

DIRECTORS FORTNIGHT

Osama (Afghanistan/Japan/Ireland) - A mulher que acreditava ser presidente dos Estados Unidos da America (Portugal) -  Filme de amor (Brazil) - Hoy y mañana (Argentina/Spain) -  Des plumes dans la tête (Belgium/France) - No pasarán, album souvenir (France) -  Quaresma (Portugal) - Gozu (Japan) - Les yeux secs (Morocco/France) -  Le silence de la forêt (Cameroon/Gabon/Central African Republic) - Niki et Flo (Romania/France) -  Deep Breath (Iran) - Kleine Freiheit (Germany)

Osama (Afghanistan/Japan/Ireland), Sedigh Barmak

"Osama is a bitter and tragic story of our life," said Sedigh Barmak about the first film to emerge from Afghanistan since the country’s liberation from the Taliban regime. "It was a time when nobody had the right to make their own decision. It’s a story about those who had lost their identity under Osama’s name. A story about being scared, where people are afraid of even the sounds of the shadows. A story about the permanent and endless story of women in prison. And a story about a little girl and all the injustice and religious nonsense that is being carried on her shoulders."

As for the film’s title, it refers to the name given to a 12-year-old girl to hide her female identity in order to find employment to support her family since the death of her father and older brother. For a time her disguise works - until the religious police force people to attend the noon prayer in the mosques. Since she is not familiar with the prayer formalities, she is sent to the religious school at Madrassa, which is also the center for military training under the Taliban. It’s there that her true identity is discovered. Taken to a judicial court, the sentence of death by stoning is set aside in her case because an old mullah would like to take her for his fourth wife.

Sedigh Barmak, born 1962 in Afghanistan, studied cinema at the University of Moscow, where he made a number of student films: Billiard (1980), Wall (1983), Circle (1984), and Stranger (1986) . Graduating in 1987, he returned to Afghanistan and was put in charge of Afghan Film. His two short films, The Disaster of Withering (1988) and The Hadith of Conquer (1991), were later banned when the Taliban took control of Kabul. Escaping to Pakistan, Sedigh Barmak made there the acquaintance of Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Ebrahim Ghafuri, the cameraman on Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar (Cannes competition, 2002) and Samira Makhmalbaf’s At 5 in the Afternoon (Cannes competition, 2003), was also the cinematographer on Osama. Currently Barmak manages the Afghan Children’s Education Movement (ACEM), an agency in Kabul to promote literacy, culture and art.

A mulher que acreditava ser presidente dos Estados Unidos da America (The Woman Who Thought She Was President of the United States) (Portugal), João Botelho

"A draft of this comedy was written a little before that sinister day of 11 September 2001," said João Botelho in a statement on the making of A mulher que acreditava ser presidente dos Estados Unidos da America. "On the 12th, I thought about abandoning the project altogether. On the 13th, I decided to go ahead." But when asked where the idea came from to make a film titled The Woman Who Thought She Was President of the United States, Botelho answered by juggling metaphors: "Ah, it's true, this film is a strange post-feminist comedy, played exclusively by women, in this century of women, and pretending to be about them." Then he hit the nail on the head: "I adore Bertolt Brecht. I adore how one of my characters says, speaking by way of her feet in extravagant shoes: ‘I should never have learned how to think. I would then be rid of so many inconveniences’!"

Once upon a time there was a woman (Alexandra Lencastre) living in Lisbon on the corner of Washington Street who believed she was really and truly the President of the United States. After all, the "white house" she lived in may appear small on the outside, but on the inside it had an "oval room", where she made all of her important decisions. One day, on eve of her 37th birthday, she decided to proclaim a special day for every woman in the world in order to guarantee her reelection. The birthday party was to be huge, with the press attending for interviews. All the women of the world were invited - save her old mother, hidden away in the basement. The day came … and with it, the surprises.

João Botelho, born 1949 in Lamego, Portugal, abandoned his engineering studies to enroll in a film school. Afterwards, he worked as a film critic and graphic artist, and founded a short-lived film journal of his own. He codirected, with Jorge Alves da Silva, the documentary A Project for Popular Education (1976), followed by his first solo effort: Conversa acabada (The Conversation Is Over) (1981). The breakthrough on the international scene came with Tempos Dificeis (Hard Times) (1988), a Charles Dickens adaptation awarded at the Venice festival. And as coincidental as it seems, it is nevertheless fitting that François da Silva, the new director of the Directors Fortnight, should open his first festival with a Portuguese film.

Filme de amor (A Love Movie) (Brazil), Júlio Bressane

Júlio Bressane is a familiar face at Cannes. Three of his 26 films to date were shown in the Directors Fortnight for three years running: Cara a cara (Face to Face) (1967) in 1969, Matou a família e foi ao cinema (Killed the Family and Gone to the Movies) (1969) in 1970, and O Anjo Nasceu (An Angel Is Born) in 1971. In addition, his last three films could be seen in the New Territories section at Venice: Miramar (1997), São Jeronimo (St. Jerome) (1999), and Dias de Nietzsche em Turin (Days of Nietzsche in Turin) (2001). And a retrospective of his work could be seen last November at the 2002 Turin Film Festival.

More than one European critic feels that Júlio Bressane has been unjustly overlooked as an auteur on the international festival scene. Born 1946 in Rio de Janeiro, he made his first short feature Bethania in 1966 at the time of Brazil’s Cinema Novo (New Cinema). "I do cinema through necessity," he said, "in order to know what it is that I do not know. If I knew what it was, I would not do it. I make films to learn and to get out of myself. I am afflicted with the ability to be many people at the same time. I make films in order to transform myself." He is a central figure in the country’s "Marginal Cinema" movement, known for its sociocritical commentary, free-style thematic interpretations, and its auteur aspirations. Over the years, Júlio Bressane has received several Brazilian film awards and prizes at international festivals in Porto, Rotterdam, Syracuse, Paris, and Toulouse.

As the title suggests, A Love Movie is about as close as a film can get to a porn movie and still be called art. Inspired by the "Three Graces" myth along the lines of Boticelli’s "Primavera" painting, except that in Bressane’s film one of the trio is a man, this is the story of three suburban friends - Hilda (Bel Garcia), Matilda (Josie Antello), and Gaspar (Fernando Eiras ) - who gather for a weekend in an apartment "to gossip, drink and take break from an otherwise mediocre daily grind." They let their imaginations soar "to live another, freer life … to exchange personalities for awhile … to live outside of themselves." The cameraman on A Love Movie was the award-winning Walter Carvalho, best known abroad for his work on the Brazilian films Central Station and To the Left of the Father.

Hoy y mañana (Today and Tomorrow) (Argentina/Spain), Alejandro Chomski

Argentinian directors have been welcomed guests at Cannes and other major international film festivals over the past couple years. In 2001, Lisandro Alonso debuted in Un Certain Regard with La Libertad (Freedom), a minimalist portrait of a woodcutter in the province of La Pampa, the large grassy plain of north-central Argentine. That same year, Lucrecia Martel, another talented young filmmaker, debuted at the Berlinale with La Ciénaga (The Swamp), a family melodrama filmed in the swampland of the northwest. And in the Week of the Critics at Cannes, Israel Adrian Caetano scored a critical hit with Bolivia, set in a rundown bar with that name in Buenos Aires. It’s the story of the bar’s cook, who has left his native Bolivia to find work in the Argentine and struggles to keep his head above water in hopes of bringing his family one day to Argentina for a better life. Later that year, it was awarded the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the London festival.

In 2002, Argentina was represented again in Cannes by Israel Adrian Caetano, whose Un Oso Rojo (The Red Bear) was invited to the Directors Fortnight. The story of another outsider down on his luck, it’s about a man with an explosive temper who has just been released from prison on parole after serving seven years for armed robbery. Unable to find a job, and with his wife and young daughter now living with a jobless horse-player deep into debt, the man agrees to join a gang to rob a bank in hope of providing for his daughter’s future. It backfires.

This year, the spotlight is on Alejandro Chomski’s Hoy y mañana (Today and Tomorrow), programmed in the Un Certain Regard section. Again, it’s the story of someone down on their luck at a time when people are begging on the streets due to Argentina’s recent social and economic collapse. Paula (Antonella Costa), the young daughter of middle-class parents, wants to become an actress, but right now her greatest concern is how to pay her rent within the next 48 hours or suffer eviction. The prospect of joining thousands of outcasts on the streets brings her to the point of despair - should she sell her body in order to survive?

Born 1968 in Buenos Aires, Alejandro Chomski has made directed seven short films over the past ten years: Wrinkles (1992), Escape to the Other Side (1993), Any Questions (1996), A Day in the Life of an Artist (1997), Alexander and the Terrible … (1997), A Moment of Silence (1998), and Dry Martini (1999). Today and Tomorrow, his first feature film, is contending for the Caméra d’Or.

Des plumes dans la tête (Feathers in My head) (Belgium/France), Thomas de Thier

Belgian cinema is the talk of the Croisette. The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, are nearly as famous as the Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio, after winning the Golden Palm in 1999 for Rosetta, followed by the Best Actor award last year to Olivier Gourmet in their Le Fils (The Son). Marion Hänsel’s Nuages (Clouds), an unusual blend of documentary with the experimental film, closed the International Week of the Critics at the 2001 Cannes festival and was acclaimed by many critics as one of the highlights of the festival. Hänsel, as this year’s Cannes jury member Danis Tanovic will tell you, also coproduced his No Man’s Land, awarded Best Screenplay at the 2001 Cannes festival. Lastly, veteran Belgian director André Delvaux ‘s documentary La double vu, La Dolce Vita et le néo- réalisme (1960) can be seen in the Salle Buñuel as part of the Federico Fellini retrospective.

Another Belgium film not to be missed can be seen in the Directors Fortnight: Thomas de Thier’s Des plumes dans la tête (Feathers in the head), a debut feature contending for the Prix de la Caméra d’Or. Here’s de Thier’s account of how he became a filmmaker: "Having been thrown out of film school, Mom and Dad really insisted on my getting a degree. So I studied marketing, which I consider a personal failure. Things began to improve when I made my first film. With my girlfriend at the time, I discovered my neighbors in the documentary Je suis votre voisin (I’m Your Neighbor) (1990), followed by the short features Je t’aime comme un fou (I Love You Like a Fool (1991) and Caisse Express (1994). At the age of thirty, I left Belgium for New Guinea in search of my childhood garden, and came back with the documentary À la recherché de l'oiseau blanc (In Search of the White Bird) (1955). In 1998, I staged a play adapted from Marlen Haushofer's ‘The Wall,’ and I filmed the desert as if it were a fable about time in the documentary Les Gens pressés sont déjà mort (Stressed People Are Already Dead) (1998). Then, in 2001, I embarked on a trip for two across Canada in order to make video contact with the baby to come in the documentary Echographie (2002)."

In Thomas de Thier’s Feathers in My Head the principal role of Blanche Charlier is played by Sophie Museur, Thomas de Thier’s wife, who had appeared in Echographie. The setting is the small Belgian town of Genappe, where life revolves around the local sugar-factory and the rotting sugar-beets in the town’s drainage system that attract migrating birds. When Blanche’s young son disappears, she feels she has lost everything. "This tragic event and its consequences," says de Thier, "are treated with dream-like touches as Blanche fights to rebuild her life …"

No pasarán, album souvenir (No Pasarán, Souvenir Album) (France), Henri François Imbert

Every cineaste is familiar with Ernst Hemingway’s monumental tributes to the heroic Republicans of the Spanish Civil War: the novel and film For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his commentary for Joris Ivens’s documentary Spanish Earth. It need not be said either that the critical writings and acerbic diaries of George Orwell are still a bone of contention among leftist intellectuals. But why did it take the National Film Board of Canada two generations before a portrait documentary about the Mackenzie Brigade could be produced and released? And Peter N. Carroll’s "The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War," a new book about the forming of the Lincoln Brigade in the United States, recounts how these still unsung heroes reached Spain by travelling incognito through France, a circumstance that mitigated against receiving recognition and compensation for their bravery.

Last, but not least, British director Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom was one of the highlights of the 1995 Cannes festival. It told the poignant story of a young Liverpool woman discovering letters of her recently deceased grandfather about his commitment to the cause and the tragedy of his lost love. Despite the over-dramatized fictional elements, the ´bitter quarrels and the shattered friendships among the foreign volunteers are clearly delineated.

Now comes Henri-François Imbert’s No pasarán, album souvenir, a 70-minute documentary programmed in the Directors Fortnight. Imbert, born 1967 in Narbonne, a documentary film-maker and film-teacher at the University of Paris, recalls in No pasaran how, one day in his childhood while visiting his grandparents, he stumbled upon an incomplete pack of six photo-postcards that had been taken in the village. Since the village lies close to the Spanish border, this is the route taken by many Republicans fleeing to France in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Twenty years later, Imbert sets off in search of the 23 lost postcards that would complete the pack. In a sense, Imbert has picked up where Loach left off in the middle of his story. As for the French filmmaker’s other documentaries, these number:André Robillard, à coup de fusils! (André Robillard, To Arms!) (1996), Sur la plage de Belfast (On the Beach at Belfast) (1996), and Doulaye, une saison des pluies (Doulaye, A Rainy Season) (1999).

Quaresma (Portugal), José Álvaro Morais

As noted by Portuguese critic Luis Miguel Oliveira, "Quaresma is like a road movie in circles, or a road movie yearning to be confirmed by the road." It’s the story of David (Filipe Cary), who in a few days will be leaving Portugal for good with his wife and young daughter to seek a better life abroad. But just before the family’s departure, David is informed of his grandfather’s death, so he returns alone to the village of his birth and finds himself in the presence of a family he has not seen for years. There he meets Ana (Beatriz Batarda), the attractive but disturbed wife of a cousin, and is caught in the spell of this enchanting creature. His stay in the village, which should have ended with the burial of the grandfather, lingers on…

Born 1945 in Coimbra, José Álvaro Morais first studied medicine at the University of Lisbon, then enrolled at the INSAS film school in Brussels in 1969 to attend filmmaking courses under André Delvaux, Ghislain Cloquet, and Michel Fano. Returning to Portugal in 1974, he directed a series of documentaries over the next two decades that linked the landscape with its people in a stylistic context, among them: Cantigamente (1975), Ma femme chamada Bicho (1976), O Bobo (The Jester) (1987), A corte do norte (1987), and Zéfiro (Zephyr) (1994). The critical breakthrough came with Peixe-Lua (Moon Fish) (1999), a sketch of Portuguese rural life that was shot near his birthplace in the north of Portugal.

To some extent, Quaresma reworks a theme found in Moon Fish - namely, that sky, air, landscape, mother earth can hold sway over the lives of village inhabitants. In Quaresma both David and Ana imagine a form of escape. Their desire to be "on the move," however, is hindered by an impossibility. In the case of Ana, her desire for freedom cannot pass the barrier of her mental condition. As for David, he is caught in a web of fascination for this enfant sauvage - so much so that both his family and his longing to leave the country are completely forgotten.

Gozu (Japan), Takashi Miike

Ten years ago, Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine (1993), one of the best Japanese Yakuza gangster made, was programmed in Une Certain Regard to high critical praise and audience favor. It was the film that kicked off his career. Four years ago, Kitano was back in Cannes with Kikujiro (1999), a Japanese coproduction with France. The story of a saki-swilling conman and part-time gangster on a journey with a young boy to find and meet the lad’s long-lost mother, this warm tragicomedy showed Kitano’s comical side. The next year, Takashi Miike, a Japanese director skilled in the action genre and films of the fantastic, was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize at Rotterdam for Odishon (Audition) (2000). The weird story of a TV producer looking for a new wife seven years after his first wife’s death, Audition begins with long interviews with women in a phony audition for a new TV show and ends on a surprising note of nightmarish horror. Audition, programmed at several international film festivals, was Takashi Miike’s breakthrough film. Ever since, he has been a favorite on the festival circuit and is perhaps better known in Europe than in Asia.

Born 1960 in Osaka, Takashi Miike enrolled in the Hoso Senmon Gakko (today Nihon Eiga Gakko) Film School in Yokohama to study filmmaking. After working as an assistant to Hideo Onchi and Shohei Imamura (Zegen 1987, Black Rain 1989), he directed his first film in 1995: Shinjuku Triad Society, a gangster movie with a personal signature. It was the beginning of a output of genre films and made-for-video productions by a prolific director who averages three to four films a year (seven in 2001!) and prides himself on his handwork. Herewith a handful of other Miike titles:Fudoh (1996), the documentary Rainy (aka Rainy Dog) (1997), The Bird People of China (1998), Dead or Alive (1999), Nippon Kuro Shakai (1999), Dead or Alive 2 (2002), The Guys from Paradise (2000), The City of Lost Souls (2000), Visitor Q (2001), Koroshyia (2001), The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001), Ichi the Killer (2001), Visitor Q (2001), Shangril-La (2002), Graveyard of Honor (2002), and Dead or Alive, the Finale (2002).

In Gozu, selected for the Directors Fortnight, the young Yakuza Minami (Hideki Sone) is bonded to Ozaki (Sho Aikawa), who is not only his gang-partner but also the Aniki ("brother") who once saved his life. Ozaki, however, seems to be losing his sanity, so their boss orders Minami to kill Ozaki. Confused as to where his loyalty lies, Minami brings Ozaki to the Yakuza "dump-off" in Nagoya. But along the way tragedy strikes - and Minami finds himself up to his neck in happenings he had never before known … or imagined.

Les yeux secs (Dry Eyes) (Morocco/France), Narjiss Nejjar

Narjiss Nejjar is not the first Moroccan director to be honored with a film in Cannes. Back in 1982, Jillali Ferhati’s Poupées de roseau (Reed Dolls), a Morrocan-French coproduction, was invited to the Directors Fortnight. Based on a screenplay by women writer Farida Benlyazid, it dealt with the plight of women suppressed by age-old traditions and archaic customs that generally favor the rights of the male in society and the husband in the family. And it should be noted too that, this year, there happens to be two Morrocan entries at Cannes. Besides Narjiss Nejjar’s Les yeux secs (Dry Eyes), programmed in the Directors Fortnight, Faouzi Bensaidi’s Mille Mois (A Thousand Months) was booked for presentation in the Un Certain Regard section. Both are debut feature films contending for Caméra d’Or honors.

Born 1971 in Tangiers, Narjiss Nejjar studied filmmaking at the Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle in Paris. Returning to Morocco, she assisted on documentaries made by other directors, then directed her own: L’exigence de la dignité (The Need for Dignity) (1994), followed by Khaddouj (1996). Both were praised as poignant statements on social conditions in Morocco. Moving on to themes of fiction, she directed three short features in a row: Le septième ciel (Seventh Heaven) (2001), Le miroir du fou (Mirror of Fools) (2001), and La parabole (The Parable) (2002). These paved the way for Les yeux secs (Dry Eyes), which she wrote, directed, and coproduced.

The setting for Dry Eyes is the native Berber country surrounded by the snow-capped High Atlas Mountains. In an isolated village, abandoned by even the elderly, a matriarchy under Hala (Siham Assif) sets the rules. The women wait for the annual visit of shepherds, to whom they sell their bodies after they pay a price to even enter the village. Unwanted children are left with a crazed old man, who lives near the village water well. For Hala, bitter and independent, it’s a way of avenging herself for past sufferings in a male-dominated society. One day, however, her mother, whom she has not seen for 25 years, returns home from a long confinement in prison. She’s accompanied by a young bus driver, whom she claims is her son. The village will not be the same any more.

Le silence de la forêt (The Silence of the Forest) (Cameroon/Gabon/Central African Republic), Didier Ouénangaré, Bassek ba Kobhio

Co-directed by Didier Ouénangaré and Bassek ba Kobhio, produced as well by Bassek ba Kobhio, Le silence de la forêt is one of the most talked about films at Cannes. For the location alone is an eye-opener: The Silence of the Forest was shot among the pygmies in the equatorial forest of Africa. This is the story of Gonaba (Eriq Ebouaney), educated in France and appointed Inspector of Schools in Bangui. After a while on the job, Gonaba suddenly drops everything and goes off to go to the equatorial forest, the home of the Babinga pygmies. But still carrying with him the ideals of western civilization, he wants to help the pygmies win their freedom from the "big men" - the powers that be, who are still caught in the throes of racism forty years after the country had won its hard-earned independence. Gonaba’s ordeal in the forest is long and trying. But in the end he discovers a timeless truth - that happiness is the most relative thing in the world.

Neither Didier Ouénangaré nor Bassek ba Kobhio are young filmmakers. Ouénangaré, 50, was born in Bambari in the Central African Republic, studied cinema in Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, and graduated from the University of Rennes. Returning to the Central African Republic in 1995, he has made a number of short films and documentaries, among them: L’eau, source de vie (Water, Source of Life) (1996), Pourquoi voter? (Why Vote?) (1998), and Conservation de la forêt de Ngotto (The Conservation of the Ngotto Forest) (1999). The Silence of the Forest is his first feature film.

Bassek ba Kobhio, 46, was born in Nindje in Cameroon. He is the founder of Les Films Terre Africaine, the production company backing The Silence of the Forest. He also launched "Ecrans Noirs," a touring film festival in Cameroon, Gabon, and the Central African Republic. One of the feature films he directed, Sango Malo (1991), was invited to Un Certain Regard in 1992. Another film to be noted is Le grand blanc de Lambaréné (The Great White of Lambaréné). Last, but not least, Bassek ba Kobhio has written three novels (published by Editions l’Harmattan).

Niki et Flo (Niki and Flo) (Romania/France), Lucian Pintilie

Renown Romanian director Lucian Pintilie, who divides his time as stage and film director between Bucharest and Paris, returns with his new film Niki et Flo to the scene of one of his greatest Cannes triumph: the screening of his banned film Reconstituirea (Reconstruction) in 1970. Indeed, back then, Reconstruction was viewed not only as a scathing attack on the Ceaucescu dynasty, but it was also widely recognized as a film metaphor on the corruption of the socialist ideal in all the countries of eastern Europe during the Brezhnev period of Neo-Stalinism. How Pierre-Henri Deleau, the director of the newly founded Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, was able to obtain a print to show the film at the very first Directors Fortnight remains a riddle, for Reconstruction was withdrawn from Romanian cinemas shortly after its premiere on orders by Ceaucescu. It wasn’t until 1990 that the Romanian public could view a "classic" that everyone had heard about but few had seen.

For the next 20 years, Pintilie worked from his base in Paris, primarily as a stage director (Chekhov, Molière, Ionescu), with occasional chances to direct a film. He shot Chekhov’s Ward Six (1973) in Yugoslavia, and he was once invited back in Bucharest to film Caragiale’s Carnival Scenes (1979) in an attempt of rectify the impasse with the authorities. Again, the "carnival scenes" proved too much. "After Reconstruction, I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to Romanian literature," said Pintilie. "Looking back after 20 years, those film scripts I wrote all ended up in smoke - each one a bomb, a torch, a candle, a buried film." After the fall of Ceaucescu, the festivals in Cannes and Venice regularly programmed a French-Romanian coproduction by Pintilie. Immediately after this year’s Cannes festival, the 2nd Transilvanian Film Festival in Cluj will honor the award-winning Lucian Pintilie with a retrospective tribute: Sunday at Six O’Clock (1965), Reconstruction (Cannes, Directors Fortnight, 1979), Ward Six (1973), Carnival Scenes (1979), The Oak (Cannes competition, 1992), An Unforgettable Summer (Cannes competition, 1994), Too Late (Cannes competition, 1996), Last Stop Paradise (Venice competition, 1998), The Afternoon of a Torturer (Venice competition, 2000), and Niki and Flo (Cannes, Directors Fortnight, 2003).

Who are Niki and Flo? According to the press release: "Niki is a retired colonel whose son has just died in an accident. His daughter and her husband, the son of Flo, want to leave Romania behind for the United States. Flo is a ‘Jack of All Trades’ whose hidden tyrannical nature will find a victim in Niki. This dominating libido is the subject of a film that shows the dispossession of one man by another. Flo will rob Niki of his few material possessions, his moral values, and, finally, the sense of his own dignity."

Deep Breath (Iran), Parviz Shahbazi

"I knew some young people who didn’t want to continue their academic studies, and didn’t show any interest in any kind of skills or art," said Parviz Shahbazi in a director’s statement. "They laughed at people who worked. They wouldn’t water a plant, even if you begged them to. And they were horribly indifferent about everybody and everything. They used to get on my nerves. They were totally irresponsible. I tried to get to know them."

Deep Breath takes place in present-day Tehran. Kamran (Saeed Amini) doesn’t feel like registering for the next term at the university. A burnt-out case, he has lost interest even in his family. Mansour (Mansour Shahbazi), Kamran’s friend, lives only for the pleasure of the moment. He likes to irritate others, and thinks nothing much about stealing things and doing acts of vandalism. Although the two young men are from different backgrounds, they stand up for each other. The despair in their lives increases when Mansour is evicted from his flat and Kamran refuses to eat for days. One rainy evening, while rambling around in a stolen car, they meet Ayda (Maryam), a student with an easy way about her. Soon she, too, is skipping classes to hang around with Mansour. The death of Kamran, who simply wasted away in a hospital bed, poses questions to the young couple that they are not yet prepared to answer …

Born 1962 in the Lorestan province of southwestern Iran, Parviz Shahbazi graduated in 1990 from the Tehran Film and TV School in 1990. Among the many short films and documentaries he made during the 1980s and 1990s are: Pala (1985), Kafa (1986), and Project 2 (1987), The Rope (1990), inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Black Spring (1991), and Shadows (1993). His first feature film, Travelers from the South (1996) received the Golden Award at the 1997 Tokyo festival. It was followed by the features Whisper (2000) and Deep Breath (2003). Asked why he chose to make a film about Iran’s "troubled generation" - his own nephew plays himself in Deep Breath - Parviz Shahbazi pointed out that "there is an empty space in Iranian cinema that belongs to this generation. The lack of attention to them could also be the reason for our lack of knowledge and understanding."

Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom) (Germany), Yüksel Yavuz

The list of Turkish directors and actors working professionally in Germany is long and distinguished - particularly to Berlin and Hamburg, where large Turkish colonies have settled and prospered since the 1960s. The door to the German film industry was opened by Turkish director Erdan Kiral, whose A Season in Häkkari (1983) portrayed the plight of a school teacher in a Kurdish village of eastern Anatolia. When the film was awarded the Silver Bear, Special Jury Prize, at the Berlinale, Kiral accepted a DAAD (German Cultural Exchange Programme) grant to stay for a time in Germany. Three years later, Tevfik Baser, based in Hamburg, made 40 Square Meters Deutschland (1986), the frightful story of a young Turkish wife drifting into insanity because her belligerent husband refuses to let her leave the couple’s modest apartment. Baser was the first Turkish-German director to compete at Cannes, with Goodbye, Stranger (1991), the story of a 50-year-old Turkish writer and political refugee hoping to find asylum in Germany.

Today, among the half-dozen Turkish filmmakers who are considered mainstays in German cinema, two are based in Hamburg. Fatih Akin’s Short Sharp Shock (1998), starring Turkish-German actor Mehmet Kurtulus, won the Bronze Leopard at Locarno. He followed this with the comedy hits In July (2000) and Solino (2003). The other, Yüksel Yavuz, born 1964 of Kurdish parentage in Karakocan, eastern Turkey, arrived in Germany in 1980 at the age of 16. He studied politics and economics at the University of Hamburg, then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts at Hamburg to study film and media. Some of his short films and documentaries won immediate recognition at festivals: 100 und eine Mark (100 und a Mark) (1994), Mein Vater, der Gastarbeiter (My Father, the Guest-Worker) (1995), and Der Mann mit dem weissen Mantel (The Man with the White Coat) (2000).

Yavuz’s first feature film, Aprilkinder (April Children) (1998), the semi-autobiographical story of Kurdish family struggling to make ends meet, starred Turkish-German actor Erdal Yildiz as a Kurdish youth fatally in love with a German prostitute. It was awarded the Audience Prize at the Saarbrücken festival. In Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom) the setting is again the redlight district of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, a haven for illegal immigrants on the run from the law. Originally titled Der Laufbursche (The Boy on the Run), it’s about a friendship between Baran (Cagdas Bozkurt), a Kurdish youth due to be deported on his 16th birthday who earns his keep running errands, and Chernor (Leroy Delmar), a Black African who lives illegally in German and deals in drugs in hopes of financing his passage to Australia. When Selim, a older Kurdish man appears on the scene, Baran recognizes him as the one responsible for the death of his parents. The traditional code calls for an act of revenge …

INTERNATIONAL WEEK OF THE CRITICS

Entre ciclones (Cuba/France) - 20h17, rue Darling (Canada) -  Deux fereshté (Iran/France)

Entre ciclones (Between Cyclones) (Cuba/France), Enrique Colina

The Critics Week, a natural harbor for young filmmakers making their feature film debuts, opens this year (the second under Claire Clouzot) with Entre ciclones (Between Cyclones), a Cuban comedy by Enrique Colina. A 59-year-old critic and documentary filmmaker, Colina is best known in Havana for his humorous television shows - but at a few select festivals abroad he is best for a raucous short film called Jau (Bow Bow) (1986). In Bow Wow we are "privileged" - as an inferior species - to follow a German shepherd through the streets of Havana as though he’s a cop cruising the precinct. From the dog’s perspective, we see mankeind at its worse -in fact, the noble human is shown to be as nutty as a fruitcake. The dog takes it all in: the foibles, the pretense, the idiosyncrasies, the spats in the street, the drooling over house pets … you name it

Between Cyclones is a feature film Enrique Colina had been wanting to make since the early 1990s. A black comedy, the focus is on Conde, a young Cuban who can’t make up his mind whether or not he should pack up and leave the island. From a practical standpoint, however, there isn’t much of a choice to begin with: either Conde continues to work for a meager living, or he learns how to hustle jobs and take his chances away from home and friends. "For my part, I felt the story’s black humor matched the sombre side of Cuba," said Colina in a interview. "And I thought that this would be a way to introduce European audiences to the nuances of social life on the island." It took him six years to raise the funds for the project. Once the funding was in place, with the help of a French coproducer, he then had to look extensively to find the right actors for the roles. This accomplished: "I worked for a long time with two screenwriters to fit the story to their personalties."

Born 1944, Enrique Colina studied languages at the University of Havana, specializing in French and English literature. He began writing film criticism in 1968. Asked who were the film directors he respected the most, he reeled off a pile of names: Tati, Buñuel, Wilder, Fellini, Petri, Risi, Forman, Kurosawa, Almodovar, Schlesinger, Tony Richardson, Woody Allen, and the Cuban master Tomas Gutierrez Alea, whose Death of a Bureaucrat (1966) and Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) almost singlehandedly launched a new national cinema movement. The parallels between Between Cyclones and Memories of Underdevelopment are well worth exploring.

20h17, rue Darling (8:17 pm, Darling Street) Canada), Bernard Émond

French-Canadian Bernard Émond returns to the International Week of the Critics for the second time - an unusual twist since the Semaine spotlights directors making their first feature films, not their second. However, as Sylvain Garel on the selection committee points out in this year’s Semaine catalogue, it was felt necessary to "double the dose" in view of the fact that Émond’s debut feature film L’homme qui bouvait (The Man Who Drinks) had been overlooked by the Cannes critics in 1991 although warmed reviewed by the Canadian critics and later honored with an armful of national awards.

In a sense, 20h17, rue Darling picks up where L’homme qui bouvait left off. Gérard (Luc Picard), a former journalist and ex-alcoholic, has returned to his roots in Hochelaga, a working-class quarter of Montreal, where he grew up. Due to an untied shoelace and a couple of other odd coincidences, he returns home late one evening - just minutes before the entire building explodes and goes up in flames. Six of his neighbors die, and he wonders why he wasn’t the seventh. Tormented by metaphysical questions that ultimately determine the course of life - Why did the others die and not himself? Does his own life now have any meaning? Do tragedies like these make any sense at all? - Gérard begins to retrace his steps on that fatal night and decides to investigate the backgrounds of the victims. The road-movie search takes him from Hochelaga, where the incident occurred, to Outremont, then to Maniwaki, and finally to the seaside at St-Jean-Port-Joli.

Born 1951 in Montreal, Bernard Émond studied to be an anthropologist and spent several years in the Grand Nord Canadien, where he worked for an Inuit TV station. As a documentary filmmaker, he has received several awards and citations: Ceaux qui on le pas léger meurent sans laisser de traces (They Died Without Leaving a Trace) (1992), L’instant et la patience (The Moment and the Patient) (1994), La terre des autres (The Other Country) (1995), L’épreuve de feu (Trial by Fire) (1997), and Le temps et le lieu (The Time and the Place) (2000). There is a link between Trial by Fire, awarded Best Documentary by the Association of Quebec Critics, and 8:17 pm, Darling Street - both deal with people who have lost everything in a fire.

Deux fereshté (Two Angels) (Iran/France), Mamad Haghighat

Ever wonder why there was little or no music heard in Iranian films until just recently? As an observant critic mentioned, the emerging Iranian cinema of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf was very much like the early films in the Italian Neo-Realism movement - just plain storytelling, pure and simple, with the extras of lighting and music, everything cut right down to the bone. Well, that’s the theme in Mamad Haghighat’s Two Angels - the story of how a young Iranian lad is confronted for the first time with the joys of music.

Ali (Siavoush Lashgari), 15-years-old, lives in a holy town far from Tehran. One day, following an argument with his pious father, he runs away from home and flees to the desert. There he hears music for the first time: a shepherd boy playing on his flute. It changes his life forever. Meanwhile, Ali’s father, fearing that he has killed his only son, goes to the mosque to confess his crime. When it becomes clear that Ali is still alive and enchanted by music, viewed by his father as sinful, the mother encourages the boy to leave the house and go to Tehran. There, he meets Azar (Mehran Rajabi), a pretty 19-year-old girl full of life and spirit, whose father is writing a book on angels…

Mamad Haghighat, born in Isfanhan, directed shorts and documentaries from 1969 to 1975. In 1971, he founded an Iranian film festival in Paris. He has written a book on "The History of Iranian Cinema" (published by the Centre Pompidou) and writes reviews regularly for Film, the Iranian film journal. He also is the programming director of the Quartier Latin cinema in Paris. While competing complete his studies in cinema, he made the documentary L’état de crise (State of Crisis) (1984), invited to the Locarno film festival. Returning to Iran, he directed his first feature film, Deux fereshté. Considering that Two Angels was produced, written, directed, and edited by Mamad Haghighat, who also happens to be a critic, the Critics’ Week is the right section at Cannes to launch his debut feature.

Palme d´Or: Elephant (USA), Gus van Sant

Grand Prix: Uzak (Distant) (Turkey), Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Best Director: Gus van Sant, Elephant (USA)

Best Screenplay: Denys Arcand, Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (Canada)

Best Actress: Marie-Josée Croze in Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (Canada), Denys Arcand

Best Actor: (ex aequo) Mehmet Emin Toprak (post mortem) and Muzaffer Özdemir in Uzak (Distant) (Turkey), Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Jury Prize: Pan é asr (At Five in the Afternoon) (Iran/France), Samira Makhmalbaf

Palme d’Or: Cracker Bag (Australia), Glendyn Ivin

Jury Prize: L’homme sans tête (The Man without a Head) (France), Juan Solanas

Caméra d’Or (Best Debut Feature): Reconstruction (Denmark), Christoffer Boe (International Critics Week)

Special Mention: Osama (Afghanistan/Japan/Ireland), Sedigh Barmak (Directors Fortnight)

First Prize: Bezi, zeko, bezi (Run, Rabbit, Run) (Serbia), Pavle Vucovic

Second Prize: Historia del desierto (Story of the Desert) (Spain), Celia Galán Julve

Third Prize: (ex aequo) Rebecca a esas alturas (At That Point … Rebecca) (Mexico), Luciana Jauffred Gorostiza, and TV City (Argentina), Alberto Couceiro, Alejandra Tomei

International Critics (FIPRESCI) Awards:

Competition: Otets i syn (Father and Son) (Russia/Germany), Alexander Sokurov

Un Certain Regard: American Splendor (USA), Shari Sprinter Barman, Robert Pulcini

Quinzaine des Réalisateurs: Las horas del dia (The Hours of the Day)

(Spain), Jaime Rosales

Ecumenical Award: Pan é asr (At Five in the Afternoon) (Iran/France), Samira Makhmalbaf

Le Prix Un Certain Regard:

Un Certain Regard: La meglio gioventù (title of old song) (Italy), Marco Tulio Giordana

Le Premier Regard: Mille mois (A Thousand Months) (Morocco), Faouzi Bensaidi

Prix de Jury: Talaye sorgh (Crimson Gold) (Iran), Jafar Panahi

Semaine Internationale de la Critique:

Grand Prix: Depuis qu’Otar est parti (Since Otar Left) (France/Belgium), Julie Bertucelli

Prix Canal+ (Best Short Film): Love Is the Law (Norway), Eivind Tolas

Prix Kodak (Short Film): The Truth about Head (Canada), Dale Heslip

Prix de la Jeune Critique:

Feature Film: Milwaukee, Minnesota (USA), Allan Mindel

Short Film: (ex aequo) The Truth about Head (Canada), Dale Heslip, and Love Is the Law (Norway), Eivind Tolas

Grand Rail d’Or: Milwaukee, Minnesota (USA), Allan Mindel

Petit Rail d’Or: Depuis qu’Otar est parti (Since Otar Left) (France/Bergium), Julie Bertucelli

Label Regards Jeunes :

Feature Film: Reconstruction (Denmark), Christoffer Boe

Short Film: The Truth about Head (Canada), Dale Heslip

#Croisette Stories - Cannes 2003

1. Gilles Jacob Interview - 2. Christian Jeune Portrait - 3. Claire Clouzot Interview  - 4. German Measles at Cannes - 5. American Pavilion Celebrates 15 Years - 6. Easy Riders at Cannes - 7. The Invasion of the Barbarians

Ron Holloway, Berlin, 5 June 2003

This is the 25th Cannes film festival under the aegis of Gilles Jacob. For 22 years - some say 23, depending on how you count those overlapping years in 1978/79, when he replaced Maurice Bessy as délégée général - he was the nominal head of the festival, with Pierre Viot serving most of that time in close partnership as festival president. This is Jacob’s 3rd year as president, with Thierry Frémaux at his side as the new délégée général.

For some reason, Gilles Jacob doesn’t believe in blowout celebrations. "It’s the festival that counts, not the man," he’s told me on more than one occasion.

I can recall only one time when he was particularly pleased with an honor bestowed upon his person. That was a decade ago, when Agnes Gund, the chairman of the board at the Museum of Modern Art, invited him to New York for a MoMA citation and reception.

In contrast to other festival heads, Jacob doesn’t travel very much. As soon as this 56th Festival International du Film closes next Sunday, he begins work in Paris on the 57th. Asked when and if he will retire, the answer is always the same: "Out of the question. I love the job. If everyone else is happy with me, then that’s the way it will stay …"

Although he has never openly said so, he is pleased with the team he has built around him to run the festival. And he is particularly proud that all the pieces are now in place to assure Cannes’s ranking as the premier film festival of the world for many years to come.

When I asked him about a distinguishing Cannes characteristic, he instantly cited: "Three Pillars - Masters, Veterans, Newcomers." To spell this out in more specific terms:"there will always be a place here for masters like Ingmar Bergman, proven veterans like Lars von Trier, and the gifted newcomers like Samira Makhmalbaf."

Still, when queried on the absence this year of Ingmar Bergman with his new film, he responded with a smile: "We’ve invited him for next year … if he can wait that long." As everyone in Cannes knows, Ingmar Bergman, Jacob’s favorite film director, didn’t show up either for his honorary Palme d’Or at the 50th anniversary of the Cannes festival. Ingmar is simply not a "crowd personality." Back in 1997, Gilles mused: "It didn’t make that much difference, because we were honored with a warm gathering of ‘Bergman women’ on the stage of the Salle Lumière." He was referring to Bibi Andersson, Lena Olin, Liv Ullmann and her daughter Linn (with Ingmar Bergman).

At this writing, two highlights by "veterans" can be noted at the 2003 Cannes festival. The first is the huge turnout for Lars von Trier’s Dogville last Monday. It was one of those "hard tickets" to come by - for the three-hour film could be programmed only once during daytime hours for press and public.

Will Lars von Trier, I asked, join that hallowed circle of Palme d’Or double-winners (Francis Ford Coppola, Emir Kusturica, Bille August, and Shohei Imamura)?

"That’s for the jury to decide," he remarked in a typical gentlemanly fashion. "We don’t interfere."

Winner of this year’s Palme d’Or or not, Lars von Trier - his real name is "Lars Trier," the "von" added for personality color - can look back at a stunning career at Cannes: The Element of Crime (1984, Competition, Grand Prix Technique), Epidemic (1987, Un Certain Regard), Europa (1991, Competition, Grand Prix Technique), Breaking the Waves (1996, Competition, Grand Prix du Jury), Idiots (1998, Competition), Dancer in the Dark (2000, Competition, Palme d’Or), and now Dogville (2003, Competition) - altogether four major festival awards, with a fifth now in the offing.

In addition, von Tier was the founding father of the "dogma" movement with Idiots, launched at the 1998 Cannes festival. "It’s now over," mused Jacob. "But after a rather remarkable run of digital features made under its auspices."

As for Denys Arcand, the other "veteran" highlight at the festival, he noted that the Canadian director received "a rare standing ovation" for The Invasion of the Barbarians that ran for over twenty minutes at the evening projection. The French press is also enthusiastic about its intellectual élan.

Denys Arcand, too, has had a rather illustrious history at Cannes: The Decline of the American Empire (1987, Directors Fortnight, FIPRESCI Prize), Jesus of Montreal (1989, Competition, Prix du Jury, Ecumenical Prize), Stardom (2000, Out-of-Competition, Closing Night), and now The Invasion of the Barbarians.

A third veteran to be noted, Alexander Sokurov "should not be overlooked at this year’s festival." Sokurov, generally viewed as the one authentic Russian successor to Andrei Tarkovsky, can be as cantankerous and unpredictable as Lars von Trier. Father and Son this year marks his fourth appearance in the Competition at Cannes, following Moloch (1999, Best Screenplay Award), Taurus (2001), Russian Ark (2002), and now Father and Son. At this writing, his Father and Son has yet to be seen.

As for the third pillar of "newcomers" on the 2003 slate, these are topped by Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon (Iran) - who, at 18, debuted at Cannes in 1998 with The Apple (Iran) in the Un Certain Regard section - followed by François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (France), Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (Distant), Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (USA), and Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (USA). Some are favored award possibilities, others curiosities for the Croisette gristmill.

Although "innovations" was not mentioned by Gilles Jacob as a fourth festival pillar, he did welcome a second animation feature to the Competition: Sylvain Chomet’s Les triplettes de Belleville (France). "We’ll be on the lookout for more animation features in the future," he confirmed.

Gilles Jacob talked at some length and with deep-felt emotion about the evening Tribute to Daniel Toscan du Plantier on a Saturday night (17) in the Salle Debussy, together with the Special Screening of Maurice Pialat’s Sous le soleil de Satan (Under Satan’s Sun), the 1987 Golden Palm winner by the producer-director team. "Toscan du Plantier was a dear friend - and a great friend of the Cannes festival."

Asked about new trends in world cinema, Jacob noted promising directors emerging from South America, Scandinavia, the Baltic States, South Korea, Japan, and Iran. And he met with Dr. Christina Weiss, Germany’s new Cultural Minister to discuss the apparent impasse with Germany on the Cannes Competition level. Apparently, according to sources on the German side, a talent "along the lines of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder" are a wish factor. This, however, was not confirmed by Gilles Jacob.

Jacob closed the interview chat with words about how "everything is now in place at Cannes" - meaning: the Cannes Film Market (MIF), the Village Pavilions (for the past two years under MIF instead of festival administration), the Fellini Retrospective Tribute, the Special Events (e.g., the Film Master Class by Oliver Stone), the Short Films Competition, the Cinéfondation Screenings, the Restored Prints section, and, last but not least, Les Marches - his own second installment of the "Stories of the Festival" trilogy that opened the festival. Further, he praised the ongoing good relationship with the Directors Fortnight and the International Week of the Critics, sidebar sections that complement Un Certain Regard in the Official Programme.

Looking out from his balcony over the harbor panorama, it can be said that Gilles Jacob, after a decade of dedication to mold an enviable future for the Cannes film festival, is indeed a master of all he surveys.

"Now go and see Thierry Frémaux," he said. "He’s the man in charge of the programming at Cannes.

Christian Jeune, 42, in charge of film documentation at Cannes, is what you would call a "festival brat."

"When I was 16," he admitted on the phone, "I skipped school in Toulon, hopped on a train to Cannes, and talked my way into screenings at the old Palais on the Croisette." Without waiting for me to ask why, he stated bluntly: "I just wanted to be there."

Easy to understand. For the late 1970s was an exciting time at Cannes. It was the era of Mnouchkine’s Moliere, Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Schloendorff’s The Tin Drum, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, to name just a few of the modern classics launched in those years at Cannes. Moreover, you could rub elbows with Herzog and Fassbinder at the Majestic Bar or Le Petit Carlton. And you hardly needed an identification tag to visit the venues along the Rue d’Antibes showcasing national cinemas.

"Those were the glory days of the Cannes festival," a veteran critic and Cannes faithful recently remarked. Also, in 1978, while Jeune was ditching classes at his école supérieure in Toulon, Gilles Jacob was introduced to the Cannes public as the nouveau délégué général, replacing Maurice Bessy as the programming head of the Festival International du film.

Today, with 20 years of service to Cannes under his belt (an anniversary of sorts), Christian Jeune is the de facto festival factotum. He heads the film documentation department, supervises the publishing of the festival catalogue, scouts Asian cinema for Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux, introduces on occasion directors and actors for Un Certain Regard screenings, and is always available to the press for any emergency that might arise. On more than one occasion, Moving Pictures has picked up a still photo of a film from his documentation file that couldn’t be found anywhere else. In sort, he’s one of a dozen key people behind the scenes who keeps the wheels of the festival turning, day in and day out.

When I asked him what his first job at Cannes was, back in 1983, he said he was working the press boxes. And when I complimented on his "American English," he corrected me on the spot. "I spent a year in London. But I really learned English during my two-year military hitch in Bangladesh." That, in turn, may account for his pronounced taste for Asian cinema and his liking in particular for Indian filmmakers. More than one Asian director owes his or her international fame to a Cannes invitation that was supported, at least as a scout, by Christian Jeune.

Take, for example, Murali Nair, the Indian director from Kerala. When it was announced at the 1999 Cannes festival that his debut feature Marana Simhasanam (The Throne of Death) had been awarded the Prix de la Caméra d’Or, Nair’s face lit up like the sun rising over the Indian Ocean. And his producer wife, Preeya Nair, turned to Jeune in tears to say: "Now I know we can find a way to pay the production costs." This year, Murali Nair is back again in the Un Certain Regard section for the third time, with Arimpara (The Story That Begins at the End).

Annually, Christian Jeune spends a couple months on the road scouting films for the Cannes festival - mostly in Asia, the Far East, and Oceania. Tops on his list are Pusan in South Korea; the "triangle" of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; Japan and India; Australia and New Zealand. When opportunity beckons, he accepts invitations to festivals in Brazil, Argentina, and Sundance in the United States. But he’s never been to Moscow, nor to Karlovy Vary, although "I’ve received standing invitations to both." That gap in his festival experience is due to "the heavy load of wrapping one year and planning for the next, which can extend into the summer."

Asked whether he enjoys some kind of "permanent status" at the Cannes festival, he begged the question by saying that the film documentation job - to which he was appointed seven years ago - is a six-month chore, running from approximately December to June. He works with an assistant in Paris, then needs two more to fatten out the team when the festival office moves on to Cannes. These "assistants" - more on the level of "collaborators" - number a Greek-American, a Scandinavian, and a Spaniard, each with more than one languages up their sleeves. Taken altogether, the team more or less covers the key film cultures important to any bonafided international film festival.

"Only a Cyrillic expert is missing," he conceded. "But when we have to check something in Russian, we can always phone Jean-Michel Frodon at Le Monde." For that matter, he could phone a score of filmmakers the world over who have been known to volunteer their services to Gilles Jacob whenever needed.

Queried on how long it takes to put together the festival catalogue, he took me by surprise by saying "less than 10 days." That’s because "the selection of the films in competition can be very late," he pointed out. Still, I countered, that kind of pressure can force mistakes, to say nothing of typos and misspellings of names in the credits. "Yes, you’re right," he acknowledged without a fuzz. "So last Friday, just five days before the festival opened, when we receive the first copy off the KESAKO press in Toulouse last Friday, we had it checked from cover to cover to be sure it was an edition we all could be proud of."

As for the decision to separate the catalogue into two parts - the "Sélection Officielle" (the artistic angle) and the "Guide Officiel" (the commercial bent) - that happened five years ago, "when Gilles Jacob felt that something had to be done print-wise to preserve the memory of the festival" without the necessity of advertising on every other page. Fortunately, for all sides concerned, the advertisers jumped at the opportunity to take home a souvenir book of their own, one that lists all the sponsors plus the MIF-film market participants, all in compact reference form. "We’ve had no complaints to speak of," confirmed Christian Jeune. "On the contrary, it was the only practical solution with a festival as large as ours at Cannes."

Jeune echoed the thoughts of many festivaliers, staff and visitors alike, who appreciate the "harmony" between the catalogue and the guide, also between the festival catalogue and the festival poster. "Gilles Jacob chooses the catalogue cover to match the one on the poster - in fact, that’s been one of the esteemed trademarks of the festival."

When I asked why bits and pieces of dialogue are included in the catalogue in regard to the film in the competition and the official programme, he responded that this was a "personal idea" that has since caught on to become an aesthetic verification of the film’s overall theme. In the beginning, he personally looked for texts that focused dramatically on the narrative line, that gave the reader a feel for the film, that seemed particularly appropriate to etch a lasting "memory" of the film experience.

"In the meanwhile," he added, "the directors themselves have gotten into the act and are now picking the passages they want to include on their pages in the catalogue. Sometimes, we find ourselves dealing with the producers, who want to add their two cents as well." When it rains, it pours.

Claire Clouzot, now in her second year as délégué général of the Semaine International de la Critique (SIC), never seems to tire of being asked the same nagging question - to which she always gives the same polite answer: "Yes, I do happen to be related to Henri-Georges Clouzot. He was my uncle, and I’m the curator of the Clouzot Collection." She follows this up, however, with an firm challenge of her own: "Now ask me a question about William Klein!"

Klein, the American photographer-documentarist based in Paris, happens to be a close friend of hers, about whom she has written a thoroughly researched book about his films and photographs. Claire also happens to be an authority on Catherine Breillat, about whose novels, screenplays, and films she has written extensively. "It makes no sense just classifying Breillat as a porn filmmaker," she says with a smile. "There’s much more there than meets the eye!" And she will wax eloquent on the late New Yorker critic-papess Pauline Kael, whose courses she had attended at Stanford University during her 13-year sojourn in the States.

If you are a globetrotting festivalier, you can bump into Claire Clouzot just about anywhere these days. Last November, at the Pusan festival, she was seen tramping through the Paradise Beach Hotel with a frown on her face. "If this festival insists on giving up Nampo-dong in downtown Pusan for the glitzy Haeundae district on the beach," she complained, "I’m not coming back next year!" In February, she was checking out the films by young Hungarian directors at Budapest. In March, at the Sofia festival, some aspiring young Bulgarian filmmakers showed up with cassettes under their arms for her to look at.

It’s been the same give-and-take wherever she’s gone - Taiwan, Argentina, Mexico, Germany, Central and Eastern Europe - since the last SIC. And for a good reason: "We know we have to have to present a powerful argument to get the films we want," she admits. "After all, Rotterdam and Berlin, both scheduled before Cannes, are attractive festival venues as well." Last year, for instance, she regretted the loss of Min Boung-hun’s Let’s Not Cry to Rotterdam simply because Min thought he shouldn’t pass up the chance of a potential sale at Rotterdam. Shot in Turkmenistan, Let’s Not Cry is the droll story of a would-be musician who returns to his native village after piling up gambling debts in Moscow.

Asked over a leisure breakfast at the Radisson Hotel in Sofia how many films she and her selection committee - four men and herself - would be viewing for this year’s SIC, she estimated "around 450 - up from the 380 viewed last year, but about the same as in 2001." This includes some documentaries, although first feature films are the section’s specialty. "You have to remember that the Semaine is exactly what it is - it runs for a week, and we select only seven features for the competition."

Of course, there are the "extras" that fatten out the program. Besides the competition, there are the collection of short films, the special screenings to open and close the Semaine, the historical archival tribute to this year’s parrain (godfather), the presentation of an outstanding documentary, and the FIPRESCI "Rediscovery" - either to correct an oversight made by this august critics league at previous international festivals or to beat the drum even louder. By some coincidence the FIPRESCI "discoveries" over the past three years have all been prominent entries at Venice: Christian Petzold's THE STATE I AM IN (Germany) in 2000, Ulrich Seidl's DOG DAYS (Austria) in 2001), and now Lee Chang-dong's OASIS (South Korea) in 2002. It should be noted, too, that these "extras" tend to attract strong attendance from the Croisette public. The echo in the French press also gets louder year by year.

Queried as to whether the new Semaine International de la Critique has become more politically oriented than before, Claire Clouzot answered with an emphatic "Yes!" She takes particular pride in the fact that the closing presentation at last year’s SIC was Bella ciao, Roberto Torelli and Marco Giusti’s on-the-spot documentary chronicle about the harsh suppression of demonstrators by the Italian police at the G8 Summit in Genua in July of 2001. The documentary was presented in Cannes over protests from the Italian government.

As for this year’s documentary event - Rodrigo Vasquez’s Condor: Axes of Evil (France) - it promises to be strike a chord with press and public. A coproduction between France 3 and Article Z, Condor examines firsthand the ground-breaking "Caravan of Death" court case in Chile about to the overthrow of Chilean President Allende in 1973 and the desert execution of 73 "militants" by army officers under General Pinochet.

Another SIC highlight is the archival screening of Marin Karmitz’s Camarades (Comrades) (France, 1970), a seldom seen documentary directed by the well known MK2 producer. As the story goes, Karmitz (born 1938 in Bucharest) was "ostracized" from the director’s chair in France for producing and directing the militantly left Comrades, followed by the equally controversial Coup pour coup (Blow for Blow) (1972). Both documentaries - the former about a strike in a Citroen automobile plant, the latter about miserable working conditions at a textile factory - followed in the wake of the May 1968 student rebellion and subsequent worker strikes.

Marin Karmitz’s presence at SIC as this year’s "godfather" is not to be underestimated. This is the producer-distributor-exhibitor who revived the career of Claude Chabrol and whose portfolio of world-renown directors includes Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Lucian Pintilie, Michael Haneke, Pavel Lungin, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard, and the late Krzysztof Kieslowski. Karmitz plans to talk to young directors about the challenges in filmmaking today.

Asked about relations with other sections at Cannes, Claire Clouzot confirmed that she’s been "on the phone every day with François da Silva" - the newly appointed délégué général of the Directors Fortnight. In the past this kind of open-ended rapprochement was rather rare, to say the least.

Clouzot also confirmed that SIC entries during the Cannes festival will be screened, as usual, in the Palais des Festivals and the Salle Miramar.

4. German Measles at Cannes

Can you name the last German film invited to compete for the Golden Palm at Cannes?

If you said "Wenders" - that’s good enough. It means you’ve just perused the press book for Wim’s The Soul of a Man, his "blues" film screened yesterday in the Sélection Officielle. But most people I queried on the Croisette stumbled over that quirky title in whichever language it’s spoken: In weiter ferne, so nah! - Si loin, si proche! - Faraway, so Close! And, after all, 10 years is a pretty long time for a seasonal drought.

Why a full decade of German measles at Cannes?

The question takes on some weight when the Cannes records show that German directors could parade the Croisette like spoiled kids in the years immediately following the (shared) Golden Palm to Volker Schloendorff’s The Tin Drum in 1979. The second Golden Palm to Wim Wenders Paris, Texas in 1984 also served to boost confidence and bolster egos. Altogether, a dozen films by German directors competed for Palm laurels during the 1980s, most of them forgotten or better off forgotten. And it should be noted too that Paris, Texas - listed in the Cannes catalogue as a French-German coproduction - was shot in English with American actors in the main roles.

National tags on competition entries have little or no meaning at Cannes even since Orson Welles’s independently produced Othello won the (shared) Golden Palm at Cannes in 1952. No one at that time (not even Welles) knew exactly which country it was officially from, so the locus originis - Morocco - was chosen as the best possible solution. Another example: the 1995 Golden Palm winner was Emir Kusturica’s Underground - listed in the catalogue as Film Européen, because there was an unofficial war going on in the Balkans.

Again, at the 1983 Cannes festival, I scratched my head at the USSR tag on Yilmaz Güney’s French-titled Le Mur (The Wall), a prison story shot in Switzerland with a cast of Berlin Turks. A rhyme with reason, it turned out. The year before, festival director Gilles Jacob had risked his job to show a pirated print of Turkish director Yilmaz Güney’s Yol (codirected by Serif Gören, but from Güney’s storyboard script) over livid protests from the Turkish government. Even the screening of Yol had to be moved up at the last minute to be sure that the jury saw the film. Yol (Outcry) won the Golden Palm in 1982, while Güney, its director, Turkey’s popular actor-director of Kurdish descent, was serving a prison sentence on a hard-to-reach island. Released within months of the Yol screening, Yilmaz Güney promptly raised funds from independent sources to shoot Le Mur in a big hurry, and his "film without a country" was invited to compete at the 1983 Cannes festival.

The ultimate reason for the German rhubarb at Cannes is national pride.

Imagine how German film officials felt when during the mid-1990s when a couple hundred representatives flew in to attend the German Breakfast in the Hotel Majestic, and all they had to talk about was a short film in competition and nary a sign of life in the other sections. After a couple years, the German press got into the act by spotlighting films that seemed a sure bet to win Gilles Jacob’s approval. Volker Schloendorff in idle conversation about showing his screen adaptation of Max Frisch’s Homo Faber (Voyager), starring French actress Julie Delpy, in Cannes - it ended up in Venice instead.

Other hits and misses on the Cannes Competition Carousel can be named, but it would only add more coals to the fire. Film directors have a way of swallowing hard when asked whether or not their films had really been rejected by the Cannes festival. "It’s not finished" is the usual refrain. My guess is that we will never definitely know whether, for instance, Tom Tykwer’s Heaven had been rejected in 2002 by both Cannes and Venice before the film left its postproduction limbo to fall into the lap of Dieter Kosslick, the new director of the Berlinale. "Who cares anywhere" might be a better response to a rejection slip, save that Cannes does happen to be more important in the public eye than Venice and Berlin put together.

A few years back, a decision was made among German film officials to improve the relations with Cannes by appointing a new mediator to smooth out the wrinkles in give-and-take dialogue with Gilles Jacob and (since 2000) Thierry Frémaux. Hans Dieter Seidel, film critic at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who had served on the international jury at the 1991 festival, was the first to be petitioned to join Christine Hopf (wife of the late Florian Hopf, Munich critic, 1983 international jury member) as a kind of combination information bureau and lobbyist stand. Christiane Peitz, film critic for Die Zeit in Hamburg and the Tagesspiegel in Berlin, presently holds this mediation position.

In 1999, Dr. Michael Naumann, a German journalist based in New York, was appointed the first German Cultural Minister. A gentleman and intellectual with broad interests and a liking for cinematic art, he paid a friendly, get-acquainted visit to the office of Gilles Jacob, followed afterwards by a well-attended press conference for the German press in the Hotel Majestic on the generalities of their conversation. As for Jacob himself, he said on record that he was quite pleased to have personally met the cultural minister, praising Michael Naumann as "a man of reflection and action."

Given the circumstances, I thought it best to pen a few questions to a dozen key people linked to the German film industry. Wim Wenders responded from a hospital. Christiane Peitz emailed me with her left hand that she had broken her right arm. Dieter Kosslick kept me entertained with bon mots on the entire flight down to Cannes, particularly in regard to the "great Cannes selection." Christian Dorsch, head of the German Film Export Union, spent an hour chatting with me on some of the reasons why there is not a German competition film at this year’s Cannes festival. Then he hit the nail right on the head: "You know, this just may not be a very good year for German cinema."

You know, he’s right!-

You can hear them an aisle or two away in the supermarkets, blabbing loudly on about whom they met yesterday and plan to see tomorrow. And when they get going on Sundance, their blood rises with their voices. Shooting digital is their thing, Dogville is the film they want to see - not so much for Lars von Trier, but because Nicole Kidman is in it. But ask a budding Yank filmmaker over a hamburger in the American Pavilion about House Makhmalbaf, and you get a blank stare. So don’t even bother mentioning Ebrahim Ghabori, that brilliant cameraman on Samira Makhmalbaf’s At Five in the Afternoon in the Competition and Sedigh Barmak’s Osama in the Directors Fortnight, both shot in today’s Afghanistan.

Of course, I’m exaggerating - a bit. The American Pavilion is a way of life, like all the other pavilions in the village. Without the Americans here, there wouldn’t be a good old-fashioned shrill-and-strident Cannes film festival. Remember, back in 1994, when Quentin Tarantino, a Sundance baby, gave the finger to booing (French?) critics as he went up on the stage to received the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction. The Coen Brothers were set for life when Barton Fink in 1991 bagged not only the Golden Palm, but also the awards for Best Actor (John Torturro) and Best Director (Joel Coen, but why not Ethan too). The roof nearly blew off the American Pavilion that night.

The best anecdote about a young American filmmaker literally launched like a rocket from the Cannes beach could be told by Steven Soderbergh, a member of this year’s international jury. As the story goes, back in 1989, Sex, Lies and Videotapes was lifted at the last minute by Gilles Jacob from the Directors Fortnight to fill a gap in the Competition, and it went on to win the Palme d’Or. That year, Wim Wenders just happened to be jury president, whose own penchant for films about filmmaking had won him the Golden Lion at the 1983 Venice festival for The State of Things. Get Roger Ebert to moderate a chat at the American Pavilion between Soderbergh and Wenders, here in town for The Soul of a Man, and you would have a jam-session to beat the shows Peter Bart puts on in the Variety tent.

This year, the American Pavilion under Julie Sisk is celebrating its 15th anniversary. Congratulations are in order. A couple of decades ago, when I met Julie for the first time at the Denver International Film Festival, she invited me over to her "Haunted House" - a Halloween fund-raising gimmick to help festival director Ron Henderson pay off a couple outstanding bills. A few years later, Julie was handling fund-raising chores for the London Film Festival. You might wonder, considering how obnoxious globetrotting Americans can be, how she could ankle so easily from one continent to another. Well, she’s a Vassar graduate, and Vassar girls know their way around.

Query her on how the American Pavilion - AMPAV, to use its internet nickname - got started in Cannes, and Julie has trouble even mentioning her own name as a primary credit. "I saw the Brits put up a temporary tent on the beach in 1986 for the British Film Year," she said. "If there’s going to be a British Pavilion, then why not an American one too? So I called Charlie, who had built the Haunted House for me, and we got permission to stack out a pavilion tent on the public beach, and that was it." Charles Stiron, Director of Operations at the American Pavilion, has been with her ever since.

Other key staff members are: Lynne McCreary (General Manager), Todd Zeller (Director of Publicity), Sandra Suria (Director of the Culinary Program, Ralph Lagnado (Director of Student Programs). The last named exercises a vital function at AMPAV. Each year, 100 students get invited to participate in the Cannes festival via the American Pavilion - screened from 400 applicants, mostly from the circa 100 film schools in the United States. In addition, 25 emerging filmmakers attend the festival too under AMPAV benefices.

When I mentioned to Sisk that a rain storm in the first year of the American Pavilion might have been washed her burgeoning enterprise into the Mediterranean, she laughed.. "You know, we had to change the location of the Pavilion each year. Once we thought we’d single those stops out with a marker - first on the beach, then on the grass, afterwards in the marine area, today next to the Riviera MIF film market stands. Maybe we’ll come out with an almanac or photo album some day."

As for the sponsors: "Kodak liked the idea - they’re our founding sponsor, and they’re still with us. Other key sponsors have been the Los Angeles Times, Intel, and Bon Appetit, among a dozen others." How the Bon Appetit and the French culinary arts found their way to American appetites at AMPAV is one of Sisk’s favorite stories - a coup, but then she’s a Vassar girl.

Altogether, the AMPAV has 25 sponsors, all of which are listed on the back page of Hollywood Reporter plug-sheets for films by American Independents in the Cannes sections and the film market. It’s these sponsors that cough up around $800,000 annually to keep the pavilion afloat financially and offer visitors "all the comforts of home": bar and restaurant, business center, cyber cafe, coffee bar. More info: www.ampav.com.

"Unfortunately," she added, "we lost some of our biggest sponsors when the dot-com movement - at its peak in 2000 - petered out last year."

Ask the film professionals who roam the Croisette what they know, or like, about the American Pavilion, and you usually get a quick answer: the parties and the speakers. Although I tend to avoid AMPAV parties to avoid hearing the latest news about Sundance, I have on occasion taken a seat in the back row to hear the celebrity speakers and pen a story for one of the trades. One of these blowout - back in 1999, the year of the Coen Brothers / Barton Fink triumph - made Cannes history. It featured Roger Ebert & the American Independents: Spike Lee (Jungle Fever), John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood), the Coens, and a half-dozen others. The pavilion was so packed that half of the listening public was spilled out across the grass.

"After that, Variety got into the act too. Now American directors with a film in Cannes are going to think twice when double invitations fall in their laps," said with a tone of regret in her voice.

Still, she was clearly proud of the fact that, last Friday at noon, Claire Danes (Terminator 3, The Hours, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) celebrated the 15th anniversary with a Ribbon Cutting at the American Pavilion. This event was then capped by an "In-Conversation" with Critics’ Week Director and Actor Campbell Scott (Off the Map, Roger Dodger, Big Night, The Sheltering Sky, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle) hosted by Roger Ebert.

Two years ago, the American Pavilion, together with all the others in the Village, became a part of MIF, the Cannes Film Market. Asked about her own future, Julie Sisk hit a tired note. "It’s getting tougher these days to raise money." At the same time she praised the Cannes festival over the years for being "such a gracious host."

Curiosity, more than anything else, pushed me to see Kenneth Browser’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (based on Peter Biskin’s bestseller) at the Salle Buñuel under the roof of the Palais des Festivals. I wanted to see if the documentary had any footage of what happened on the roof of the Old Palais on the Croisette right after the press screening of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider in the competition at the 1969 Cannes festival. Because I was there.

Well, it didn’t.

And it looked to me like the footage Browser did include - tumult in the streets, crowds streaming down the Croisette - didn’t happen that year at all. It happened in 1968, despite the loose words uttered by Peter Fonda about "revolution" in the film. But who really cares - it makes for color.

Anyway, here’s my side of the Easy Rider story.

When the crowd swept up the stairs to the roof of the Old Palais after the press conference for scotch-and-canapes, the spokesman for the bikers was Jack Nicholson. Not Hopper, not Fonda. Jack jumped up on a chair and ranted "Yah, man, that’s the way it is!" to peaheads who said they didn’t like "that trip scene" in New Orleans. French critic Robert Chazal, enjoying Jack’s splurge of bravura, wrote: "Like my colleagues, I am amazed by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider - proof that an American Nouvelle Vague exists."

Chazal’s colleagues, however, weren’t all that taken by the American Wave that year. The talk at Cannes ’69 was the presentation of an illegal print of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, causing the Soviet delegation to walk out of the festival. That was the year, too, of Glauber Rocha’s Antonio Das Mortes from Brazil, Eric Rohmer’s Ma nuit chez Maud from France, Andrzej Wajda’s Chasing Flies from Poland, all favorites of the French intellectual set and the leftist papers.

As for the International Jury, it split the Golden Palm between Lindsay Anderson’s If (UK) and Bo Widerberg’s Adalen 31 (Sweden). To show his solidarity with the 1968 revolutionaries, Widerberg walked up on the stage in jeans. Dennis Hopper received the Prix de la Premiere Oeuvre, or what might be referred to as the Prix de la Caméra d’Or of yesterday

Where was Bob Rafelson all this time? The producer at BBS Productions (one "B" for Bob Rafelson, the other for Bert Schneider) who had backed Easy Rider? He was off to Rome right after the screening to talk with Orson Welles about a new project that was to come to nought. Bob doesn’t much like critics, he hates interviews, and he adamantly refuses to read anything written about himself. That’s why you won’t find him in the Kenneth Browser documentary.

I caught up with Bob Rafelson some years later - in 1994 - over pasta at Dan Tana’s in Los Angeles. He talked a bit about Hopper’s Easy Rider, a bit more about Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show ("my favorite film under our BBS logo"), but mostly about drifting. He had just returned home to LA from a six-week tramp across Turkey.

Everybody who knows Rafelson, knows he’s a compulsive drifter. He’s the Nicholson-Dupree character in Five Easy Pieces (1970), the Nicholson-tramp character in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), and practically all the other Nicholson characters in a half-dozen more Rafelson-directed film. His adaptation of the James Cain classic, competing for laurels at Cannes, delighted the French. Some insisted at the press conference that The Postman had inspired Albert Camus’s The Stranger.

I was in LA with a Berlin producer to encourage Bob to finish Wet, his "shortie" in Regina Ziegler’s Erotic Tales series, for a presentation at Cannes. His Wet was the first film in that series of 30 tales. Pierre Rissient, an enthusiastic Cannes supporter of the "American New Wave," had asked for a work-in-progress cassette. Gilles Jacob saw it, liked it, and programmed it on a warm Sunday afternoon at the 1994 Cannes festival. It was paired with Susan Seidelman’s The Dutch Master, another American ET seen at Telluride, under the teasing rubric: Contes de la séduction.

Last year, Tanja Meding, ace associate at Ziegler-Film, flew to LA to see if she could talk Rafelson in to working with a crew from the Berlin Film Academy on a second ET, digitally shot. He agreed. Provided he could play the main role - "I’ve never really acted in a movie before." He also asked if he could invite a few friends - British playwright Trevor Griffiths and French actress Fabienne Babe - to join him before the camera.

Here’s how Porn.com goes:

Veteran film director Matty Bonkers (Bob Rafelson), a Hollywood legend, arrives in Berlin for an honorary retrospective tribute. While introducing his award-winning Mockery, he receives a phone call from his producer lying in intensive care at a hospital. Blau (Trevor Griffiths) needs a favor for old times’ sake. Could Matty finish a porn movie before his legs get broken by Tokyo Tony? Matty reluctantly agrees. On the set he meets movie star and ex-cello-player Inga (Fabienne Babe) - and a skinny porn-star playing Hitler …

Guess what? Porn.com is a hit on the festival circuit (Moscow, Montreal, Belgrade, Thessaloniki), but it can’t be shown on German TV. The commissioning station, WDR in Cologne, got cold feet. Spoofing Hitler in one thing. Spoofing him in a spoof of a porn film is spooky.

Shortly, Bruno Ganz, the legendary stage-and-screen actor, will interpret the role of Hitler in a German movie. That should melt the ice a bit.

When I showed Porn.com to my relatives in the laid-back rural town of Momence near Chicago, whereThe Road to Perdition was shot, they laughed their heads off.

The laugh is on WDR.

7. The Invasion of the Barbarians

An hour ago, I saw Denys Arcand’s Les invasions barbares (The Invasion of the Barbarians) (Canada) at the Wednesday morning screening in the Palais des Festivals.

It’s the best film I’ve seen in the Competition up to now. Although I have to admit that I haven’t seen everything. And as there’s still more to come, it is possible that I might change my mind. But I doubt it.

Besides, what does it matter? Last year, I thought Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (Palestine) was the best film of the festival. And I was firmly convinced that Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (Russia/Germany) would get the Prix du jury à un technicien for its one-shot technical brilliance.

I was wrong on both counts.

So what made The Invasion of the Barbarians so special?

Believe it or not, this is the first film to my knowledge (documentary, feature, whatever) about “9/11” that makes any sense at all. It picks up where Arcand’s Le déclin de l’empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire) left off, programmed 16 years ago in the Directors Fortnight at the 1987 Cannes festival. For those of you who never saw The Decline of the American Empire, it’s what you would call a “talking-head” film. A raucous bunch of middle-aged hippies turned cynical intellectuals gather regularly to banter away on a decaying American Way of Life, including issues in Quebec and Canada. What they had to say back then was pretty damn interesting.

That autumn, on my next trip to the Montreal World Film Festival, I made it a point to look up Denys Arcand. To make sure he didn’t turn me down, I had a mutual friend at the National Film Board phone him on my behalf. I wanted to know what had happened to those lung-afflicted workers who, in his documentary Cotton Mill, Trademill (1970), had coughed their way through interviews with Arcand on the blatant abuses in the Quebec textile industry. It was one of those unusual cases at the NFB - a commissioned documentary banned for six years because of “its biased point of view.”

We met in a bar a short distance away from the Hotel Meridien because “just too many festival people know me there.” An hour stretched into two, then three, then into an entire afternoon. What I learned from Denys about Canadian trademills and the Fall of the American Empire could fill a book. Maybe two, to be fair to the mills.

Anyway, to thump back down on today’s Croisette, The Invasion of the Barbarians picks up where The Fall of the American Empire left off. Again, it’s talk and more talk. Save that, this time, it’s at the bedside of Rémy, the retired loudmouth professor and spiritual leader of the group, who is dying of cancer and is fighting back with all his might in a show of blusterous pride. Gradually, the grown kids of these cynical old armchair-revolutionaries get sucked into the vortex of their conversations as well. Subtly, ever so subtly, the audience too. Towards the end of the film, as the close friends review their past, a barb was thrown in the direction of Jean-Luc Godard - the intellectual brat of the Nouvelle Vague directors, whose early films Rémy probably knows by heart.

Will The Invasion of the Barbarians win the Golden Palm?

Probably not, unless there’s a feeling among certain members of the international jury that the French have been right all along at the United Nations.

So who is going to win this year?

Look at the critics’ charts, and you see the à la folie palms popping up like tulips for Lars von Trier’s Dogville. But those voting juries in the trades aren’t much of an index. They’re mostly there to provide festivaliers with chatter at parties.

Want to know one reason why Moving Pictures has dropped its voting jury this year? Well, last year, too many critics waited too long to phone in their votes. Some, I suspect, were waiting to see how their colleagues would vote before taking the plunge themselves. Others, I’m sure, had at least one gap in their voting chart because “that was the night I got invited to a dinner in Mougins.”

Two years ago, there was that unusual case of a French critic voting on polls in both Le Film Français and Moving Pictures without bothering to tell us. How did he ever miss Screen? But give him credit - Jean Roy’s voting was pretty solid.

Want to know the voting charts were not just fun, but packed a wallop that was heard all the way down the Croisette?

It was back in 1983, when the critics unanimously - and loudly - expressed disappointment that neither Robert Bresson’s L’argent (France) nor Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (Italy) were deemed worthy of the Golden Palm by the International Jury. Instead, that prestigious honor was bestowed on a surprised Shohei Imamura for The Ballad of Narayama (Japan).

A month later, while attending the Moscow film festival as a Variety correspondent, I found out at Dom Kino, the headquarters of the Association of Soviet Filmmakers, how and why Tarkovsky - one of the critics’ favorites, along with Bresson - got bumped off the Cannes pedestal.

As the scuttlebutt went among some bitterly disappointed Russian directors, Filipp Yermash, the head of Goskino, had “warmly recommended” the presence of Sergei Bondarchuk on the International Jury, knowing that it would be hard for Cannes officials to affront the Oscar-winning director of War and Peace.

You know the rest, one articulated with a shrug of the shoulders.

Tarkovsky and Bresson received, ex aequo, the runner-up award: un Grand Prix de Cinéma de Création - given for the first time as a jury citation, and never again.