Report 2003          Festival-Homepage

Finely crafted with great sensitivity, this film celebrates how religion grows human life in community (as personified by the two women Aicha and Zoubida) and also shows how religion can be used to show division and fear, messages of great importance and urgency for our contemporary world.

The film was also awarded the Golden Leopard.

During the 56th edition of its film festival, Locarno proved to be a real hot spot and at the same time the location for a truly cool festival. Indeed, air conditioned cinemas were places of relief from top temperatures of 41.5 degrees, and an over-heated Irene Bignardi, the festival’s artistic director, delivered her opening speech with bare feet to cool off. Locarno’s film festival is relaxed, a festival for the people, where every night the viewers on the Piazza Grande are the first stars, recorded on film before the open-air screening begins and put on the big screen as they take their places. Through its film selection, Locarno attempts to be a festival for those without a voice, a forum for films – and destinies – from forgotten places around the world. For this reason, this year’s festival showed, besides its retrospective of jazz films, a human rights programme as well as a section on young Argentinean filmmakers, and it has begun a three year programme on Cuban cinema. British director Ken Loach was awarded the Leopard of Honour and, with his films that speak of compassion and humaneness, matched well the festival’s interest in those underrepresented in cinema.

Among the nineteen films that were shown in the international competition, there were many images of families and of young people growing up in them, between mothers who were sometimes strong and sometimes overburdened and fathers who were often absent. We saw Frankie, in >16 Years of Alcohol< (Richard Jobson, Great Britain), son of a poetry-loving and imaginative but drink-driven father and a betrayed mother, Frankie, bound by an addiction to violence and alcohol, desiring love desperately, yet constantly tormented by the fear of betrayal. We were shown Maria (in >Maria<, Calin Netzer, Romania/Germany/France), who struggles to bring up her seven children while she suffers a violent, drinking and gambling husband. Catherine Hardwicke’s >Thirteen< (USA) tells the story of a girl in puberty, of her troubled relationship with her mother, her non-existent relationship with her father and her relationship with another girl on whose friendship she cannot rely. >Malen’kie Ljudi< (Little People, Nariman Turebayev, France/Kazakhstan) describes the life and the struggles of two young men who live without parents, searching for roots and for orientation in a big city that does not offer them many possibilities. A completely different way of growing up is shown in >Bom, Yeoreum, Gaeul, Gyeowool, Guerigo, Bom< (Spring, Summer , Fall, Winter… and Spring, Kim Ki-duk, Korea/Germany). The film describes a young child and his Buddhist master, who live in a temple that floats on a lake. The camera observes quietly the younger man’s experiences during the seasons of his life; it witnesses his departure for the world beyond the lake and, finally, awaits his return to the centre of the lake and the cycle of the seasons.

Some films in the international competition dealt with political struggles in various countries. >Chokher Bali< (Rituparno Ghosh, India), based on a short story by Rabindranath Tagore, problematizes the status of the widow at the time of Tagore and shows her vulnerability in a society that denied her existence especially if she was childless. >Gori Vatra< (Pjer Zalica, Bosnia-Herzegovina/Austria, right picture), which won a Silver Leopard, illustrates the difficulty of achieving peace in post-war Bosnia. Under the surface of a comedy, the film presents characters who practice corruption whether they are in peace or at war, and for whom the ideas of reconciliation and democracy are difficult to fathom.

>Khamosh Pani< (Silent Waters, Sabiha Sumar, Pakistan/France/Germany) won both the prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Golden Leopard. Khamosh Pani looks at Pakistani history – at the partition of Pakistan and India and at the growing of religious fundamentalism in Pakistan – through the eyes of two women, Ayesha and Zubeida. The film is Sumar’s first feature film, but even though fictional, it is still based on real, political events that Sumar has researched. The main character, Veero/Ayesha, stands for the women caught between Sikh and Muslim men at the time of the partition. Veero represents those Sikh women who succumbed to the pressure of their husbands and fathers and killed themselves before the arrival of Muslim men in their villages. Ayesha embodies those women who got away, married the Muslims who had captured their villages and became Muslims themselves. Ayesha’s son personifies the rising force of fundamentalism under military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq. Ayesha, now a widow with her teenage son, is pressured again, this time by the Muslim fundamentalists her son belongs to, into renouncing totally her former identity as Veero. But Ayesha/Veero speaks strongly, with her whole life, against a world in which she has no choice but to accept the name and identity given to her by those with political and religious power – and thus to live – or not to accept – and to die. Zubeida, who loves Ayesha’s son, is young but nevertheless strong, like Ayesha. In the face of her beloved’s sympathies for religious fundamentalism, she declares that she prays but also thinks. The film ends on a gloomy and a hopeful note, both at the same time. Religious fundamentalism is powerful as ever when Ayesha’s son is an adult, but Zubeida keeps in her dreams the memory of Ayesha’s/Veero’s strength and freedom of spirit.

The ecumenical jury explained its decision with the following statement: ‘Finely crafted with great sensitivity, this film celebrates how religion grows human life in community (as personified by the two women Ayesha and Zubeida) and also shows how religion can be used to sow division and fear, messages of great importance and urgency for our contemporary world.’

Ulrike Vollmer was member of the Ecumenical Jury