GAZ BAR BLUES, from Québec filmmaker Louis Bélanger.

Statement of the Jury:
GAZ BAR BLUES shows the extraordinary tolerance and love of an ordinary group of men, as they struggle to cope with change and dislocation in a world becoming increasingly globalised. With great economy and artistic skill, the film quietly celebrates the community-creating power of loyalty and acceptance among family and friends.

A special mention goes to the film

BLESS YOU, PRISON, from Romanian filmmaker Nicolae Mãrgineanu.

For more information on the Ecumenical Jury in Montreal, with the list of all the winners since 1979, visit http://www.officecom.qc.ca/jury.html

27th Montreal World Film Festival
Festival report by Ron Holloway, GEP/Interfilm, 23 September 2003

The Cordon (Goran Markovic, Serbia-Montenegro) - GAZ BAR Blues (Louis Bélanger, Canada) - In the Forest … Again (Goutam Ghose, India) - August Sun (Ira Madiyama, Sri Lanka) - When Ruoma Was Seventeen (Zhang Jiariu, China) - The Encounter (Ömer Kavur, Turkey/Hungary) - The Professional (Dusan Kovacevic, Serbia-Montenegro) - Like a Bad Dream (Antonio Mitrikevski, Macedonia/Croatia) - Bless You, Prison! (Nicolae Margineanu, Romania) - Awards

One of the ironies of the 27th Montreal World Film Festival (27 August to 7 September 2003) was the presentation by Montreal festival director Serge Losique of three films programmed at relatively the same time by Venice festival director Moritz de Hadeln at Venezia 60 (27 August to 6 September). These were the following: Andrei Zvjagintsev’s Vozvraschenie (The Return) (Russia), winner of the Golden Lion, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s 27 Grams (USA), with Sean Penn awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best actor; and Hana Makhmalbaf’s Joy of Madness (Iran), a documentary made by the 14-year-old sister of Samira Makhmalbaf on the latter’s making of Pan é asr (At Five in the Afternoon), her competition entry at Cannes. By way of a return gesture, a Montreal conmpetition entry, Goutam Ghose’s In the Forest … Again (India), was next shipped to Venice for its European premiere on the Lido. And it should be noted, too, that The Return had been originally booked for the Locarno festival - then yanked at the last minute from the lineup for entry in the Venice competition. Either the major international film festivals are relaxing their rules, or producers and directors and sale agents can play one festival off against another to get the best programming deal.

No matter, Montreal was the winner this time. From the more than 400 films from 75 countries programmed by Serge Losique, the committed cineaste could track an amazing array of new talent and trends from every corner of the world. Herewith a summary of themes and styles seen in key competition entries:

Grand Prix of the Americas to the Balkan: Kordon (The Cordon) (Serbia-Montenegro)

Montreal audiences may well remember Goran Markovic’s presence at the 1995 FFM - when, in flawless French, he expounded on the whys and wherefores of the "Third Balkan War in his Burlesque Tragedy. Selected for the competition, it dealt not only with conditions in Yugoslavia during the siege of Sarajevo, but Markovic also put the blame squarely on President Slobodan Milosevic for leading the country to political and financial ruin. A French-Bulgarian coproduction, Burlesque Tragedy shared the prize for Best Director at the 1995 Montreal festival - and later went on to win the First Prize at the Yugoslav Film Festival in Herzeg Novi. It should be noted, too, that the screenplay had been penned by noted Belgrade writer-playwright Dusan Kovacevic, whose own written-and-directed The Professional is also contending for festival honors at this year’s Montreal festival.

Five years after Burlesque Tragedy, Goran Markovic, now an international name on the festival circuit, was invited to participate in the New Territories section at Venice with Serbia, Year Zero (2001), a French coproduction that offered a personal, no-holds-barred view of the havoc wrought by the Yugoslav president throughout the 1990s. The film opens on the day after Milosevic’s fall (4 October 2000), when crowds stormed the state television station in Belgrade and other hated symbols of the regime. This year, Goran Markovic is back in the Montreal competition with what might be considered the third film in his political trilogy on the Fall of Milosevic: Kordon (The Cordon).

The setting is Belgrade, a few weeks into the New Year of 1997. The citizens of Belgrade and the people of Serbia have been protesting in the streets for four months in a row., hoping that peaceful demonstrations will eventually result in the overthrow of the Milosevic government. But the dictator responds by forming a "cordon" of police thugs with baseball bats to bully the leaders of the protest movement into making a fatal mistake that might wipe them out altogether. Six policemen - Zmaj, Crni, Dule, Kole, Seljak, and the driver Uros - form this cordon. In a sense, the present a cross-section of rightist, racist, Serb nationalist thought. Since they’ve been on their patrols day and night for weeks, often sent here and there by their superiors on wild-goose chases to prevent people from the surrounding towns and villages to enter Belgrade, their nerves are strained to the limit and an explosion is imminent. Are they the hunters or have they become the hunted?

Born 1946 in Belgrade, Goran Markovic is the son of Rade and Olivera Markovic, both legendary figures in Yugoslav cinema and theater. In 1965, he enrolled in the Prague Film School (FAMU) to study under Oscar-award-winning Elmar Klos. One of a half-dozen talented young Yugoslav filmmakers - later tagged the "Czech Film School" directors - the group also numbered Goran Paskaljevic, Srdjan Karanovic, Lordan Zafranovic, Rajko Grlic, and Emir Kusturica. Markovic’s first feature film back in Yugoslavia was an immediate hit with the home audience: Special Education (1976). He this followed with a string of artistic and commercial triumphs that won several awards at international film festivals: the black comedy National Class (1978), another commercial hit; Jack of All Trades (1980), a comedy awarded at Manila; Variola Vera (1981), a modern-day version of Albert Camus’s "The Plague" classic; Taiwan Canasta (1985), a political film about the 1968 student demonstrations in Belgrade; Deja Vu (1987), a self-styled horror film invited to the Panorama at the Berlinale; Meeting Point (1989), seen at the Montreal World Film Festival, and Tito and Me (1992), a personal review of Yugoslav history that was awarded at Sen Sebastian. With each of these films, Goran Markovic shifted gradually from comedy and satire to social and political statements that made him a target by the Milosevic government for his outspoken political views.

Gas Station Blues: Louis Bélanger’s GAZ BAR Blues (Canada)

Remember all those quaint characters that walked in and out of Harvey Keitel’s cigar store on a Brooklyn corner in Wayne Wang’s Smoke (1994) and Blue in the Face (1994), the back-to-back productions that took the 1995 Berlinale by storm and went on to become one of the cult hits of the year? If you hold a soft spot in your movie-going heart for that tandem, then you will also like Louis Bélanger’s GAZ BAR Blues (Canada), the Quebec production that opened this year’s Montreal World Film Festival (MWFF). For nothing much happens in GAZ BAR Blues save for the little miracles that make the world go round: the local gentry who gather daily to talk weather and politics, the task of helping a little girl to get un-locked from a car, the adventure of a would-be thief who can’t get his act together, the customers who forget or refuse to pay, the banged-up car towed onto the lot that belongs to the son of the owner. "I wanted to show the beauty of this universe," said Louis Bélanger about small-time, working-man’s life in a provincial town back in 1989, as though the scene belongs to the past and never will return again. Indeed, for Bélanger it won’t - for GAZ BAR Blues is autobiographical and is drawn from his own experiences as a boy.

"Boss" Brochu (Serge Thérault) is the owner of this rundown gas-station bar-cafe, half service station, half cafe. His wife is dead, he is suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, and two of his three sons would sooner leave town rather than have to inherit or take over the gas station. Réjean (Sébastian Delorme), one of the sons, is a photographer with a yen for travel, and he does manage in one sequence to transport himself to Berlin to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall. Guy (Danny Gillmore) plays in a blues band at local jazz joints, a thematic element that lends both color to the story and the title. Only Alain (Gilles Renaud), the 14-year-old son, would like to stay on at his father’s station, but Boss won’t hear of it. "I don’t see the gas station owner as someone out to make money," said Louis Bélanger in an interview. "If he did, he wouldn’t allow people just to sit around and shoot the breeze all day long at the station. In fact, most of those who stop by don’t even have a car."

Born 1965, Louis Bélanger collaborated with filmmaker Denis Chouinard on the short films: Dogmatisme or le songe d’Adrian (Dogma, or Adrian’s Dream) (1988), Le Soleil et ses traces (The Sun and Its Rays) (1990), and Les 14 définitions de la pluie (The 14 Definitions of Rain) (1992). He co-directed Les Galeries Wilderton (1991) with Bruno Baillargeon. His first feature film, Post Mortem (1999), was awarded Best Director at the 1999 MWFF. Set at a mortuary, Post Mortem sketches the life of a funeral attendant whose fate is intertwined with that of a single mother. She, in turn, supports her daughter by seducing men to steal their money and credit cards. As for GAZ BAR Blues, it was a multi award winner at this year’s Montreal festival: the Special Grand Prize of the Jury, the Ecumenical Award, and voted the Most Popular Canadian Feature Film.

Homage to Indian Master Satyajit Ray: Goutam Ghose’s Abar Aranye (In the Forest … Again) (India)

In a letter of 18 January 1970, Satyajit Ray wrote to Marie Seton about the calamitous opening of his new film, Aranye Din-Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) (1969), based on a novel by Sunil Ganguly: "The new film opened two days ago. The infamous Samity Mantid hired hoodlums in the theatre at the opening show - their misbehavior nearly wrecked the films for the audience - quite the worst experience of its kind I’ve ever had. But subsequent shows have been OK - and I’ve heard some extremely favorable comments. Personally I think it’s one of my most satisfying films - subtle, complex (but not bewilderingly so), and superbly acted by the entire ensemble. Almost certainly the most contemporary of my films in feeling."

A few months later, Days and Nights in the Forest was invited to compete at the Berlinale - and again the same disruption took place in late June to ruin its international premiere. Four days into the festival, the Berlinale grounded to a halt amid a chorus of catcalls, resignations, and protests from both the international jury and would-be revolutionaries. Today, looking back, only a few critics even remember having seen the Ray film.

As Goutam Ghose underscores in his homage to Satyajit Ray, In the Forest … Again, the importance of Days and Nights in the Forest cannot be underestimated in the overall oeuvre of Indian master. Termed by Ray himself as "one of my most satisfying films," it was to be the first of a film quartet that continued to probe the theme of complacency in modern Bengali society. The films to followed completed that study: Pratidwandi (The Adversary) (1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited) (1971), and Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) (1973), the last named awarded the Golden Bear at the 1973 Berlinale, the Golden Hugo at Chicago, and the Indian Prime Minister’s Gold Medal. Set during the war and famine in Bengal in 1942/43, and based on a novel by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, Distant Thunder is the story of a teacher and a doctor who set up a school in a village, only to see it disintegrate in the face of war and famine. Social and moral principles fail. All is determined by the fight for survival. But despite the insanity of a man-made catastrophe, Ray keeps his distance, wrote Berlinale film historian Wolfgang Jacobsen, and made "an elegiac rather than a plaintive film."

Soumitra Chatterjee, one of Satyajit Ray’s favorite actors, played the lead roles in both Days and Nights in the Forest and Distant Thunder. Not by coincidence, Soumitra Chatterjee also plays the lead role in Goutam Ghose’s In the Forest … Again. And he is joined by two other actors from the Ray film and a third represented by a family member: Shubhendu Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, and Samit Bhanja. In the original they were four city-bred young men who wandered into the forest of Palamau for a vacation. Now, 34 years later, they return to the same forest again "on a walk down memory lane" (Ghose). One friend has died, another is dying of cancer. Things, of course, are no longer the same. But neither is the Palamau forest of Ray’s time - it’s now unsafe for tourists. In the Forest … Again was one of the highlights of the recent Cinefan film festival in New Delhi.

Born 1950 in Calcutta, Goutam Ghose graduated from the University of Calcutta, worked in theatre and as a photo-journalist, and began to make documentaries in 1973. A Marxist by temperament, he worked out his social and political problems in his feature films: Maa Bhumi (Motherland) (1979), Dekha (Perceptions) (1982), and Paar (Crossing) (1984). Together with Buddhadeb Dasgupta, another Calcutta-based director, Goutam Ghose has helped considerably to rejuvenate Bengali - and Indian - cinema. Other productions in his filmography: Hungry Autum (1974), Our Land (1980), The Occupation (1982), Land of Sand Dunes (1986), Meeting a Milestone (1990), The Voyage Beyond (1992), Boatman of the River Patma (1992), The Kite (1993), Beyond the Himalayas (1996), and The Doll (1997) - the name named programmed at the Montreal World Film Festival. An auteur in the fullest sense, Goutam Ghose wrote, directed, photographed and composed the music for In the Forest … Again.

Caught in the Throes of the Civil War in Sri Lanka: Prasanna Vithanage’s Ira Madiyama (August Sun) (Sri Lanka)

"I wanted the film to be as authentic as possible," said Sri Lanka director Prasanna Vithanage about the making of Ira Madiyama (August Sun). "As such, it required a massive cast of nearly 900." One of the most anticipated world premieres at the Montreal World Film Festival, August Sun was a long time in coming and took a long time to make. Set in the mid-1990s, when the civil war in Sri Lanka was at its height, it depicts how three individuals struggle to recover what they have lost and are willing to risk everything for what really counts in life: a longing for identity, a sense of dignity, and a yearning to love and be loved. With its large cast (reported to be 900) and its use of nonprofessionals who speak in two languages (Singhalese and Tamil), to say nothing of the decision to shoot much of the film in the northern territories still partially under the control of the LTTE ("Tamil Tigers") rebels, August Sun was a undertaking that took four years to complete from conception to realization.

As for the three individuals in the story, their narrative lines are not separate episodes but cross each other within a simultaneous time frame. Arfath (Mohamed Rahfiulla), an 11-year-old Muslim boy, struggles to keep possession of his dog while his family is being forced out of their home by the rebels - more or less on religious grounds, for Muslims in Talaimannar are in the minority. Chamari (Nimmi Harasgama), a young woman living in Colombo, the Sri Lanka capital, sets out on a search to find her husband, a pilot said to be missing in action during the war. And Duminda (Namal Jayasinghe), a young soldier returning from the fighting front, walks into a brothel in Anuradhapura, a sacred city for the Buddhists, only to find that his sister is working there. She, in turn, has recently lost her only means of living - a job in a garment factory in which the women have been exploited by western companies. Since all three stories take place under a scorching hot August sun, the human side of these personal tragedies become searing experiences that, perforce, take precedence over the film’s social milieu and political background.

Queried as to how difficult it was for the nonprofessionals in the film to relive the agonies of the recent past, Vithanage confirmed: "Initially, they were reluctant to go down memory lane with little or no previous experience in acting. However, they later agreed to join the project in order to be able to tell their story to the world." Workshops for the amateurs were held in Colombo and Anuradhapura over a stretch of some months - first, to find the right people, and then to coach them to interpret scenes in the proper realistic context. As for when August Sun will be released in Sri Lanka - if at all, he hinted that a favorable government decision depends a great deal on the film’s success on the festival circuit. And he added that subtitles would surely be needed in Sri Lanka to preserve its authenticity in word and dialect for the respective ethnic communities.

Born 1962, Prasanna Vithanage worked first in theater upon his graduation from school. In 1986 he directed for the stage George Bernard Shaw’s The Arms and the Man from his own translation, and in 1991 he scored critical hits with stage productions of Dario Fo’s Rhaspberries and Trumpets. Turning to the broader audience medium of cinema, he was successful from the start: Sisila Gini Gani (Ice on Water), his debut feature film, received nine national film awards. Subsequent successful film productions have placed him in the forefront of Sri Lanka directors: Anantha Rathriya (Dark Night of the Soul) (1996), Pawuru Walalu (The Walls Within) (1997), and Purahanda Kaluwara (Death on a Full Moon Day) (1997), awarded the Grand Prix at Amiens. When the government censor took exception to a misinterpreted burial scene in Death on a Full Moon Day, the film was denied release - and Prasanna Vithanage had to take his case to court to have the issue resolved in his favor. Still, it was only because the uncut version of the film had shown abroad in 1999 that a home release in 2001 was permitted without cuts. Death on a Full Moon Day then went on to become one of the most successful box office releases in Sri Lanka.

It was the international success of Death on a Full Moon Day that paved the way for August Sun. During his 1999 visit to the London film festival, Prasanna Vithanage discussed his idea of a feature film set during the civil war period with noted screenwriter Priyath Liyanage, who also happened to be working on a similar project. So they combined talents and enlisted the support of producer Soma Edirisinghe. The giant production ended up costing in the neighborhood of $10 million. To help finance the undertaking, they hit upon the idea of promoting the film via a homepage on the Internet - www.iramadiyama.com - whereby investors, supporters, and interested parties can track August Sun from the very first day of shooting right through the postproduction, the release, and its performance thereafter.

Chinese Independent Film on Ethnic Hani Tribe: Zhang Jiarui’s Ruoma de shi sui (When Ruoma Was Seventeen) (China)

"I wanted to make the film as realistic as possible, so I shot it like a documentary," said Zhang Jiarue about Ruoma de shi sui (When Ruoma Was Seventeen), his debut feature film competing for the Prize of the Americas at Montreal. "Sometimes we were able to put the camera right in the middle of the streets to capture the flow of real life at an open market. Other times, however, I had to arrange the scenes to fit the exact context of the story. But I liked to improvise wherever a chance presented itself."

When I asked him how he was able to deal with the usual restrictions set down by government censors, particularly in regard to an approved script, Zhang made no bones about the fact that When Ruoma Was Seventeen is an "independent film, one of the first that can be shot outside of the studio system" - meaning that the chances are better than even to win government approval for home release. In view of the fact that western audiences until now have been dieting on "wildcat productions" - that is, foreign-financed projects that never even bother to seek government approval, but rely entirely on distribution sales through festival exposure - When Ruoma Was Seventeen is breaking new ground for the burgeoning "Chinese Independent Movement" that augurs well for the future.

On the surface, this is a simple story set among the Hani tribe, a minority ethnic group in the southern Yunnan province. Ruoma (Li Min), a 17-year-old girl with an open smile and a friendly disposition, lives with her grandmother. Each morning, he packs sweetcorn on her back and walks across the rice terraces to a village to sell roasted ears on a street corner among other vendors. Because her costume is colorful, tourists - both Chinese and foreign - ask to take a picture of her, to which she shyly agrees in hopes that they will buy a roasted ear of corn in return. Her popularity is noted by Ming (Yang Zhigang), a young photographer down on his luck, who hits on the idea of having her pose in a native costume against the scenic rice terraces for American and European tourists who pass through to see the striking beauty of the terraces. It works, and soon Ming is making enough money to pay his room rent, while Ruoma has money in her pocket too.

Of course, Ruoma hopes one day to visit the big city and "ride in a glass elevator" - an experience told to her by a girlfriend who has recently returned home from a rather disappointing venture in the city. What happens next should be seen, but let it be said that Ruoma’s romantic dreams are on the way to be fulfilled when she hits on the idea of joining Ming on his return to the city.

Although When Ruoma Was Seventeen is Zhang Jiarue’s first feature film, he has an impressive portfolio to date. First he studied philosophy, graduating from Sechuan University in 1983. Enrolling in film courses at the Beijing Film Academy, he found work also as an assistant director at the Beijing Youth Film Studio. Moving on to television, he has directed a dozen telefeatures and tv-series. And it is this "TV polish" that is particularly evident in When Ruoma Was Seventeen - namely, close-up shots of faces and pictorial beauty to carry the flimsy story along its predictable path.

"I had to look a long time and test-cast hundreds of Hani girls to find Li Min," said Zhang Jiarue about his final choice for the winsome Ruoma, whose smile alone can light up a theater. When audiences left the screening at the Parisien, the camera buffs in the crowd lined up to take pictures of "When Ruoma Was at the FMM in Montreal.

"Life-and-Death Thriller: Ömer Kavur’s Karsilasma (The Encounter) (Turkey/Hungary)

Sometimes referred to as the "Turkish Bergman," other times as a master of the psycho-thriller along the lines of Clouzot and Hitchcock, Ömer Kavur is often compared on home grounds with the legendary Yilmaz Güney. An auteur in the best sense of that term, he has a way of linking all his important feature films together via recurring visual motifs and a slow-paced shooting style that allows the viewer plenty of time to meditate on the symbols, metaphors, and images as they mesh together into a whole. The image of a clock, for instance, is often used for a moment that is lost forever as well as for the passage of time in a particular context.

Critics and cineastes may well remember Kavur’s Motherland Hotel (1987), with its oblique reference to the ruling party in parliament in the persona of a demented porter. In The Hidden Face (1991) he leans heavily on Sufi mysticism to accent colors and mirrors, simple objects and natural landscapes, faces and movements, in order to reinforce with aesthetic means and sensual beauty the feeling of a timeless journey into the self on the part of the protagonist. Also, in Journey on the Hour Hand (1997), the story of a clock repairman on a strange journey to a distant village to repair a tower-clock, the claustrophobic atmosphere of Motherland Hotel is felt when the repairman checks into a similar hotel when he arrives in the village of his destiny. And although the director is too original to steal from Vertigo, the parallels to the Hitchcock classic are visible nonetheless in Journey on the Hour Hand. Indeed, suspense is built as the scope of the story broadens into a murder mystery that involves a tyrannical husband who loves to hunt and a group of blind singers who "sense" more than what most people "see." If anyone is left in the dark throughout most of this zigzag tale of forbidden passions, then it’s the introverted clock-repairman who meets and falls in love with a mysterious woman in a woods, who may or may not have committed a murder.

Now comes Karsilasma (The Encounter), Ömer Kavur’s entry in the competition at Montreal. The story begins at a group therapy session in Istanbul, where Sinan, an architect, meets Mahmut, the owner of an illegal gambling casino. Both struggle with their guilty consciences. Sinan is depressed because he feels responsible for the death of his son in a motorcycle accident. And Mahmut is contemplating suicide because he cannot forget a crime he once committed in his youth. When Mahmut receives word that he can meet someone from the past, he abruptly leaves Istanbul - and is later reported dead. At this point, the story shifts from a psychological drama to a psychological thriller, as Sinan sets out to investigate a case of homicide that is peculiar for its complete lack of suspects. His search brings him to an island and a life-and-death encounter - first with a young man who bears a close resemblance to his dead son, and then with a young woman who resembles the face in a photograph carried around by the murdered friend.

Serbian Secret Service Strikes Back: Dusan Kovacevic’s Profesionalac (The Professional) (Serbia-Montenegro)

Devotees of stage and screen should recognize The Professional at a glance. The original stage version of Dusan Kovacevic’s Profesionalac has been running at the Zvezdara Theater in Belgrade (where Kovacevic also happens to be the manager) almost nonstop since its premiere there in 1990. A few years later, after the play had been performed to packed houses at the Zvezdara for the 100th time, it was translated into English and given a public reading at a theater in Berkeley, California - again to enthusiastic response. The word spread - and, in 1992, The Professional was staged at the North Beach Repertory Theater in San Francisco. A few months later, it was performed in London at the little Offstage Downstairs theater. In 1994, the play was adapted as a telefeature by German writer-playwright Ulrich Plenzdorf to the similar milieu of the "Stasi" (the secret police of former German Democratic Republic) - when it fit like a glove. Andreas Dresen directed this adapted version under the title The Other Life of Herr Kreins. Then, in 1995, The Professional had premiered at the Circle Theater in Manhattan, an off-Broadway venue. Now, at this year’s Montreal festival, Profesionalac is running in competition in its original Serbian-language version - directed by its author, Dusan Kovacevic.

The Professional has the give-and-take of a Beckett play. The setting is postwar Belgrade. Luka, a former officer in the Serbian Secret Service, pays a visit to the office of Teja, a former intellectual dissident, who now heads a publishing house and hold a position of power in the cultural and political circles of the new Serbia. In typical "Endgame" fashion Luka carries with him a suitcase that contains everything of literary importance to the former dissident - in fact, much more than the writer Teja would care to know, for as a conscientious agent the stranger has been shadowing his intellectual partner for 40 years and knows all his secrets. During the sparring match, a hyped game of one-upmanship, the ex-dissident is forced to admit that he wasn’t such a courageous writer after all. Indeed, his "shadow" could easily publish a bestseller based on the true story, if he so desired, simply because he has written everything down. So, once again, the tables have been completely turned.

Born 1948 in Mrdjenovac, Yugoslavia, Dusan Kovacevic graduated from the Belgrade Academy of Film, Theater, Radio and Television. Working in both film and theater, he immediately made a name for himself as one of the countries best screenwriters in the genres of comedy and satire. Among his commercial and artistic hits were Goran Paskaljevic’s Special Treatment, Goran Markovic’s Burlesque Tragedy, Slobodan Sijan’s Who’s That Singing Over There?, and Emir Kusturica’s Underground. On occasion, he directs his own screenplay: Balkan Spy was awarded Best Screenplay at the 1983 Montreal World Film Festival. Asked about what drives him to write about Yugoslavia, and now Serbia-Montenegro, with a sharp pen, he responded in an interview: "If next month we were lucky enough to embark on a new path, it would be my pleasure to begin writing about lovers hiding in closets when the husband has unexpectedly returned home. But that would mean that this region has embraced a new civility life. And then the Serbs would have terrible literature, but could finally live like other normal people. When that happens, I would agree to stop writing dramas of dread and horror - and inspiration would abandon me as well."

Trauma in the Balkans: Antonio Mitrikevski’s Kako Los Son (Like a Bad Dream) (Macedonia/Croatia)

Remember the political brouhaha over "Macedonia" that hit the Montreal World Film Festival back in 1991? That was when Stole Popov’s Tattoo, the first feature film to bear the banner of the newly constituted state of Macedonia, was programmed in the Cinema of Today section. Critics recognized the film for what it was. This story of a cantankerous yet sympathetic individual who gets jailed for absurd reasons and then dies a victim of police brutality, Tattoo featured an outstanding acting performance by Meto Jovanovski as the "loser" Ilija, who gets jailed for loitering on a street-bench after an argument with his wife. Another innocent in the same prison, who was treated even more brutally by the police than Ilija, was an Albanian student who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tattoo was the kind of timely sociocritical film document that does credit to a democratic society.

Yet when Tattoo was invited to the Montreal film festival, its presence as an official entry from the newly named "Republic of Macedonia" (following the country’s breakaway from the Yugoslav federation) provoked a protest by the city’s Greek community - without, however, anyone having even seen the film. Later, too, when Tattoo was honored by a jury of peers with a Nomination for European Film of the Year, the Greek government again demanded its withdrawal from award consideration through Mikis Theodorakis, a member of the same European Film Academy. But both the FFM and EFA stood firm, and Tattoo was given a complimentary press conference and Montreal and the largesse of free publicity for a rediscovered national identity. Overnight, Macedonian cinema became known the world over!

Antonio Mitrikevski (sometimes spelled Mitricevski), invited to compete at this year’s Montreal festival with Like a Bad Dream, is also well known to the FFM public. His debut feature film, Across the Lake (1997) premiered at Montreal six years ago in the Cinema of Today section. Based on a true story, it’s the ill-fated story of young Macedonian man who spent two decades in Albanian prisons and hard-labor camps - simply because he dared to cross Lake Ohrid to the Albanian short to visit the woman he loved. The idea for the feature came from Mitrikevski’s award-winning documentary, The Love of Koco Topencarov (1991). Across the Lake featured a finely etched performance by Polish actress Agnieszka Wagner as the heroine. And the film’s striking cinematography led several critics to praise Antonio Mitrikevski as "Sergei Paradjanov of Macedonia."

Born 1961 in Skopje, Yugoslavia, Antonio Mitrikevski studied cinema at the Lodz Film School in Poland, where he directed four awarded student shorts: The Duel, A Day, Time, and Echo. Before directing his debut feature Across the Lake, he worked in television and made a name for himself with a telefeature based on William Saroyan’s Is Somebody There?, followed by The Cheater and The Landlady. As for Like a Bad Dream, it’s an interlinkiing tale of people who have experience traumatic experiences and seek to have them rubbed out of their subconscience by relegating the past to the realm of a "bad dream." For two of the individuals, their ordeals were indeed traumatic: Sheytan experienced a hell on earth during the Balkan War, and Ivan couldn’t come to grips with the demanding life-style of a western metropolis …

Look Forward in Anger: Nicolae Margineanu’s Bincuvantata Fii, Inchisoare (Bless You, Prison!) (Romania)

Based on a true story, Nicolae Margineanu’s Bincuvantata Fii, Inchisoare (Bless You, Prison!) recounts the prison ordeal of Nicoleta Valery-Grossu, a young Romanian intellectual, who was arrested in 1949 on a false charge of espionage and sentenced to four brutal years in a hard-labor camp for women. In truth, she was arrested and interrogated simply for being a member of the opposition party and thus a thorn in the side of the Ceaucescu regime. In this regard, it should be noted that Tito’s break with Stalin in mid-1948 led to many such instances of false charges in all the neighboring Balkan countries. The film’s title is taken from a poem by Alexander Solzhenitzyn: "Blessed Be Thy Name, Prison!" - in reference to the Russian writer’s own time of prison internment (1945-53) in the gulag of Central Asia, a experience that later formed the core of his book "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." It should be noted, too, that both Valery-Grossu and Solzhenitzyn were released from prison in 1953, shortly after the death of Stalin.

As recounted in the film - adapted from her book with the same title - Nicoleta Valery-Grossu (Maria Ploae) experiences a conversion back to her religious faith after weeks of exhausting interrogation, solitary confinement, and suffering under the brutal hands of her guards. Furthermore, since she felt that her faith helped her enormously in her struggle to maintain her dignity, she was quite willing to pass this "blessing" on to her fellow prisoners - in this sense:,don’t despair or give up hope under any circumstances. The film chronicles not only her gradual acceptance of prison life as and a test offered by her Maker, possibly even a gift of God, but also how she inspired her fellow prisoners to rediscover their religious heritage and faith as well. "You can betray," she says in a key scene. And adds: "You can die. Or you can find God."

One of the veteran directors in Romanian cinematography, Nicolae Margineanu was born in 1938 in Cluj, Romania. Upon graduating from the Theatre and Film Institute in Bucharest, he found employment first at the Buftea Studios as a director of photography and was the DP on nine films for other directors. After he made his debut as a feature film director with This Above All (1978), he never looked back and has directed a dozen feature films to date. He belongs to the so-called "Generation 1970" - composed of Dan Pita, Mircea Veroiu, Stere Gulea, and Iosif Demian, among others - who had set new standards of responsible filmmaking in the wake of the thaw that swept across Central and Eastern Europe. Also known as an "actors’ director," Margineanu drew a refined, balanced performance from Maria Ploae in the lead role.

AWARDS

INTERNATIONAL JURY

FEATURE FILMS
Grand Prix of the Americas (Best film):
KORDON (THE CORDON) by Goran Markovic (Serbia and Montenegro)

Special Grand Prix of the Jury:
GAZ BAR BLUES by Louis Bélanger (Canada)

Best Director:
PLANTA 4a (4TH FLOOR) by Antonio Mercero (Spain)

Best Artistic Contribution:
BINECUVÂNTATA FII ÎNCHISOARE (BLESS YOU, PRISON) by Nicolae Margineanu (Roumania)

Best Actress:
MARINA GLEZER for the film "EL POLAQUITO" (THE LITTLE POLISH) by Juan Carlos Desanzo (Argentina-Spain)

Best Actor:
SILVIO ORLANDO for the film "IL POSTO DELL’ ANIMA" (THE SOUL'S HAVEN) by Ricardo Milani (Italy)

Best screenplay:
PROFESIONALAC by Dusan Kovacevic (Serbia and Montenegro)

Innovation Award:
LE INTERMITTENZE DEL CUORE (MEMORY LANE) by Fabio Carpi (Italy)

SHORT FILMS
1st Prize:
VIE ET MORT D’UN INSTANT D’ENNUI (LIFE AND DEATH OF A BORING MOMENT) by Patrick Bossard (France)

Jury Award:
IN BED WITH MY BOOKS by Michael Bergman (U.S.A.)

GOLDEN ZENITHS

BEST FIRST FEATURE FILM
"I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE A SAINT" by Geneviève Mersch (Luxembourg-Belgique)

Mentions:
"DOGS IN THE BASEMENT" by Leslie Shearing (U.S.A.)
and
"MOVING MALCOLM" by Benjamin Ratner (Canada)

GOLDEN ZENITHS FILMS OF THE DIFFERENT CONTINENTAL SECTIONS 2003 MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL
Golden Zenith for the Best European Film:
KOPPS by Josef Fares (Sweden)

Golden Zenith for the Best Canadian Film:
THE DELICATE ART OF PARKING by Trent Carlson (Canada)

Golden Zenith for the Best American Film:
DIE MOMMIE DIE by Mark Rucker (U.S.A.)

Golden Zenith for the Best Latin American Film (Glauber Rocha Award):
CLEOPATRA by Eduardo Mignogna (Argentina-Spain)

Golden Zenith for the Best Asian Film:
WATASHI NO GURAMPA by Yoichi Higashi (Japan)

Golden Zenith for the Best African Film:
Ex-aequo :
EL KOTBIA by Nawfel Saheb-Ettaba (Tunisia-France-Morocco)
LE SOLEIL ASSASSINÉ by Abdelkrim Bahloul (France-Algeria)

Golden Zenith for the Best Film from Oceania:
ALEXANDRA’S PROJECT by Rof de Heer (Australia)

Golden Zenith for the Best Documentary Film:
SEXE DE RUE (STREET SEX) by Richard Boutet (Canada)

AIR CANADA PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD OF THE 2003 MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL
"PLANTA 4a" (4th FLOOR) by Antonio Mercero (Spain)

The 2nd most popular film was:
"GAZ BAR BLUES" by Louis Bélanger (Canada)

AWARD FOR THE MOST POPULAR CANADIEN FILM 2003 MONTREAL WORLD FILM FESTIVAL
GAZ BAR BLUES by Louis Bélanger (Canada)

FEDEX Award for the Most Popular Short Film of the 2003 Montreal World Film Festival:
"CHERRY FRUITBREAD" by Laura Turek (Canada)

The 2nd most popular short film was:
"ISLET" by Nicolas Brault (Canada)

FIPRESCI PRIZES (INTERNATIONAL FILM CRITICS)
Feature film
"PROFESIONALAC" (THE PROFESSIONAL) by Dusan Kovacevic (Serbia and Montenegro)

Short film
"VIE ET MORT D’UN INSTANT D’ENNUI" (LIFE AND DEATH OF A BORING MOMENT) by Patrick Brossard (France)

ECUMENICAL AWARD
GAZ BAR BLUES by Louis Bélanger (Canada)
Special mention to:
BINECUVÂNTATA FII ÎNCHISOARE (BLESS YOU, PRISON) by Nicolae Margineanu (Romania)

OTHER PRIZES
A Special Grand Prix of the Americas for their exceptional contribution to the cinematographic art:
ERLAND JOSEPHSON, actor
DENISE ROBERT, Producer
MARTIN SCORSESE, director

Sidebars at 27th Montreal World Film Festival

Ron Holloway, Filmrutan, 23 September 2003

Out-of-Competion: Elephant (Gus van Sant, USA) - The Twilight Samurai (Yoji Yamada, Japan) - Bokunchi - My House (Junji Sakamoto, Japan)
Cinema of Europe: Granny (Lydia Bobrova, Russia/France) - Warming Up Yesterday's Lunch (Kostadin Bonev, Bulgaria/Macedonia) - Forest (Benedek Fliegauf, Hungary) - Remake (Dino Mustafic, Bosnia/France/Turkey) - Names in Marble (Elmo Nüganen, Estonia) - Edi (Piotr Trzakalski, Poland) - With Love, Lilly (Larisa Sadilova, Russia)
Cinema of Asia: Strokes and Silhouettes (Anjan Das, India) - Magnifico (Maryo J. de los Reyes, Philippines) - Joy of Madness (Hana Makhmalbaf, Iran) - At Five in the Afternoon (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran/France) - Paradise Is Somewhere Else (Abdolrasoul Golbon, Iran) - Two Angels (Mamad Haghighat, Iran/France) - Deep Breath (Parviz Shahbazi, Iran) - Don’t Cry (Amir Karakulov, Kazakhstan) - Cala, My Dog! (Lu Xuechang, China)
Cinema of Africa: A Thousand Months (Faouzi Bensaidi, Morocco/France/Belgium)
Cinema of Oceania: For Good (Stuart McKenzie, New Zealand)
Cinema of the Americas - Latin America: Today and Tomorrow (Alejandro Chomski, Argentina/Spain) - Between Cyclones (Enrique Colina, Cuba/France)
Documentaries of the World: Iranian Women Filmmakers (Hamid Khairoldin and Majid Khabazan, UK/Iran)

The 27th Montreal World Film Festival (FFM) - this year, scheduled 27 August to 7 September 2003 - was far more than just the Official Competition for the Grand Prix of the Americas. It also offered cineastes, festivaliers, and an avid movie-loving public - indeed, one of the most informed on the entire festival circuit - a feast of over 400 films from 75 countries. To accommodate both international hits and new discoveries from filmlands around the world, the FFM entries were broken down into a dozen sidebar sections. Besides the Official Competition for Features and Shorts, these numbered the following: Out-of-Competition, Cinema of Europe, Cinema of Asia, Cinema of Africa, Cinema of Oceania, Cinema of the Americas - Latin America, Cinema of the Americas - United States, Cinema of the Americas - Panorama Canada, Documentaries of the World, Tributes, and Canadian Student Film Report. Herewith a rundown on highlights in nearly all of these sections:

The surprise winner of this year’s Golden Palm at Cannes - after all, this is an HBO telefeature - Gus van Sant’s Elephant (USA) is remarkable mostly for its cast of non-professional high-school teenagers. And it might not have gotten this far as it did at Cannes 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, a 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 forthcoming, and certainly justified, 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-award winners were to follow - for Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Uzak (Distant) (Turkey) and Denys Arcand’s Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions) (Canada) - which also says something about this year’s International Jury at Cannes, headed by President Patrice Chéreau.

Make a note of it: Tasogare Seibei (The Twilight Samurai), box office bonanza in Japan and the hit of several international film festivals - from Berlin to Hong Kong and now Montreal. As cineastes well know, the Samurai legend is the movie-myth-twin to the American Western. So it came as no surprise when more than one observant critic noted the similarity between Yogi Yamada’s The Twilight Samurai and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, the classic Western starring Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott as two aging gunfighters about to stare their destiny straight in the face. And while we’re at it, Bill Holden in Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is only a step away from Seibei Iguchi, the poor, humble, rugged, self-effacing, stick-to-the-code professional in The Twilight Samurai, interpreted brilliantly by Hiroyuki Sanada and photographed against a stunning rural landscape.

Based on three short stories by bestselling author Shuhei Fujisawa, the story tales place at the end of the Edo period, when the samurai sword is about to be replaced by western ways and influences upon the accession to the throne of the first Meiji Emperor in 1867. With the country on the verge of civil war, duels are forbidden, and the samurai has lost respect as law enforcer. Seibei’s duties are now confined to an office, where he works as a clerk and earns barely enough to feed his two young daughters and an aging grandmother after the death of his wife by tuberculosis. His pay - 50 bales of rice a year - is so meager that he does the unthinkable: he sells his samurai sword to keep his impoverished family from starving and now walks around with a wooden sword at his side. And because he doesn’t drink or carouse, he is teased as a "twilight samurai" by other clan members - although at the same time respect is accorded him as a past master of the short-sword fighting technique.

One day, Tomoe (Rie Miyazawa), a former childhood sweetheart and sister of a close clan member, arrives on the scene and spends her free time taking care of Seibei’s daughters. Tomoe had loved Seibei as much as he had loved her, but both had been forced to submit to prearranged marriages. Now, however, they are free to marry - save that Seibei’s poverty stands in the way. Nevertheless, the money deficit can be resolved if Seibei agrees to fight and kill another old samurai, Yogo (Nenji Kobayashi), who refuses to commit the ceremonial harikari ordered by a misguided superior. Before the reluctant Seibei leaves to fight Yogo, he sits down with Tomoe to confess his love during a hair-cutting ritual. And before Seibei and Yogo fight, they too sit down and talk about old times and their mutual experiences of loss and suffering. The days of the samurai are over, says Yogo, as the pair draw their swords …

Yogi Yamada, born 1931 in Osaka, has directed some 80 feature films to date. He joined the Sochiku Film Studios in 1954 and directed his first film, The Stranger Upstairs, in 1961. Every Japanese TV viewer is familiar with his popular Tora-san tv-series, now up to 48 episodes. His Fifteen (2001) was presented at last year’s Montreal film festival. As for The Twilight Samurai, this may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but with the restrained performances by the charismatic Sanada Hiroyuki and the captivating Rye Miyazawa it comes pretty close to it.

Comic Strip Characters on a Japanese Island: Junji Sakamoto’s Bokunchi (Bokunchi - My House) (Japan)

Japanese cinema made waves as seldom before at this year’s Berlinale. Indeed, the high-water mark of the entire festival was the retrospective tribute honoring the 100th anniversary of the birth of Yosujiro Ozu (1903-1963). Ozu’s acclaimed classic, Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) (Japan 1953), was highlighted in the official program. This, in addition to four more seldom seen Ozu films programmed in the Forum: Umaretewa mita keredo (I Was Born, But …) (1932), Ukikusa monogatari (A Story of Floating Weeds) (1934), Banshun (Late Spring) (1949), Bakushu (Early Summer) (1951) - all of which aptly demonstrated his maturing skill as he approached the making of Tokyo Story.

The best of the Asian films programmed in the Panorama was also a Japanese feature in the Ozu tradition: Junji Sakamoto’s Bokunchi (Bokunchi - My House). Based on a popular comic strip about Little Itta and his younger brother, the boys don’t realize that their elder elegant sister, who has returned to the island for a visit, is actually the younger boy’s mother. Nor do they suspect that she had abandoned her child to the care of the grandmother to earn money else with a trade as old as mankind. Thus, Bokunchi is far from being a typical children’s film. Rather, Sakamoto portraits poverty and hardship without moralizing. As in Rieko Saibara’s comic strip, the characters are familiar to us all - sometimes they are clowns, other times they fight to maintain their dignity, other times they are downright repulsive. In short, life for the villagers on this out-of-the-way island is one of survival. A happy end is the stuff of dreams.

Born in 1958 in Osaka, Junji Sakamoto worked as an assistant to such mainstream directors as Ishii Sogo and Izutsu Kazayuki until he was given the chance to direct his own first feature film in 1989. Since then, he has directed twelve feature films, of which the best known is KT (2001), presented in the competition at last year’s Berlinale. The title refers to the code-name for the secret service operation - the focus is on uncovering the facts behind a notorious Asian kidnapping caper. Back in 1972, Kim Dae-Jung, the Korean opposition leader, later elected President of the Republic of Korea in 1998 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, was forced to seek refuge in Japan following a number of attempts on his life instigated by the military dictatorship in his country. On 8 August 1973, Kim was kidnapped in a Tokyo hotel by Korean secret agents - only to be released unharmed, but beaten, five days later - after the kidnapping had prompted an international incident that compromised South Korea’s relations with both Japan and the USA. The film was released last year in May in Japan and in June in Korea - just before the opening in both countries of the World Cup soccer games.

"You know, the villages in the north of Russia only survived the war thanks to the women," said Lydia Bobrova in an interview. And she added: "In many respects, too, the whole country survived only thanks to the second front - the female front." This theme is found in all three of the feature films Lydia Bobrova has been able to write and direct over the past decade: Oi, vy, gusi (Hey, You Geese) (1991), V toi strane (In That Land) (1997), and now Babusya (Granny), awarded the Grand Prix at the St. Petersburg Festival of Festivals in June and the Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in July. The rural traditions with a simple way of life are clearly dear to her, which is clearly why she laments the threat today to the village community. Often compared to the late author-director Vasily Shukshin (1929-1974), the comparison rings true in one regard: both were born in Siberia.

Born 1952 in Zabaikalsk, Siberia, and based today in St. Petersburg, Lydia Bobrova studied history at the Leningrad State University, graduating in 1975, and then screenwriting at the Moscow Film School (VGIK), graduating in 1983. He mentor at the VGIK Screenwriting Faculty was the legendary Yevgeny Gabrilovich, whose long career had stretched back to the silent period and whose screenplays for Yuly Raisman in particular were known for their intimate, often spiritual portraits of tragic heroines. Shifting gears, she next enrolled in the Higher Courses for Director, graduating in 1991 with but one known short feature to her credit: Vzrosleniye (Growing Up) (1989). Her concern for country life in the vein of Vasily Shukshin was immediately noticed by critics in her first feature film: Hey, You Geese!, the story of the debasement of a Russian family in which she extended the metaphor to generally include rural life across all of Russia at the beginning of the 1990s.

After a lapse of six years, Lydia Bobrova made her mark as an auteur with style and vision when her In That Land premiered at the 1997 Anapa film festival to a strong critical echo and was highly praised by the international press at the 1998 International Forum of Young Cinema in Berlin. Filmed completely with nonprofessionals, she depicts a village falling apart as alcoholism infect the males in and leaves the women to keep things going as best they can. And she places the fault equally on the doorstep of the local government when a sick farmer is offered an opportunity to recuperate in a sanitorium on the Black Sea - save that the voucher never arrives! In That Land did not go unnoticed: Lydia Bobrova was awarded a State Prize in 1999.

Babusya (Granny), the poignant tale of a grandmother who has sacrificed all for his children, can be viewed as the third film in a Bobrova trilogy about the fate of women in Russia. Abandoned in her old age by uncaring inlaws, the grandmother Tusya (Nina Shubina) is forced out of her home by a callous son-in-law and dropped on the doorstep of her sister Anna (Olga Onishenko), who in turn has to deal with a drunkard son. Despite troubles and travails, the sisters manage to carry on - until Anna falls and breaks her hip. Left on her own again, Granny decides to resolve the situation for everyone involved by "following the voice of an angel" …

Critics and cineastes versed in the Cold War remember all too well that political ploy known as the "Macedonian Question" used by the Soviet Union and Bulgaria wherever the Socialist Bloc wanted to provoke Yugoslavia or rile the West. In simplified political terms it was a red-light button pushed by the Soviet Union to challenge the legitimacy of Macedonia as a republic in the Yugoslav federation. But in its cultural context it went far deeper: it questioned whether Macedonia was linked to Bulgaria by way of language, or to Greece by way of history, or to Serbia by way of destiny. The dispute began in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, then resurfaced again in 1944, when Macedonia became an independent republic in the Yugoslav federation. And it has continued on and off right up to 1991, when the Republic of Macedonia adopted a new constitution, one that, de facto, made it an independent nation separate not only from Greece and Bulgaria, but also Serbia and Albania.

Kostadin Bonev’s Podgjvane na Vcherastnija (Warming Up Yesterday’s Lunch), a Bulgarian-Macedonian coproduction adapted from a novel with the same title by Konstantin Zankov, deals with this highly complex and controversial issue of the "Macedonian Question" from both a cinematic and a literary viewpoint. On the cinematic side, the setting is Macedonia but the director is Bulgarian. On the literary side, the film chronicles the tragic fate of Katerina (Svetlana Yancheva), a old woman from the town of Prilep in Macedonia on the border to Bulgaria. Interviewed for television by an inquiring reporter from Skopje, Katarina’s recollections begin in 1914, when Macedonia was divided into three separate sections following its bloody fight for liberation from the Ottoman Empire. Shortly thereafter, Katarina’s father, a communist, is imprisoned in Serbia. Worse still, from a cultural viewpoint, Katerina is abused in school by a Serbian teacher for refusing to speak and write in Serbo-Croatian, rather than in their own Bulgarian-related native language. Later, her father dies as a partisan. Then, when Tito breaks with Stalin, Katerina is imprisoned and sent to a forced-labor camp for espionage, simply because of her relationship to an Hungarian communist. Now, years later, Katerina is encouraged to tell her story before a camera.

Born 1951, Kostadin Bonev studied at the Film and Theater Academy in Sofia. His has made a name for himself at Bulgarian TV, directing both telefeatures and award-winning documentaries. His credits include: Lovtzi na sanishta (Hunting for Dreams) (1991), Pisma do dolnata zemya (Letters to the Underground) (1994), Duhat na hrama (The Temple’s Spirit) (1995), Sluzhenie (Divine Service) (1996), Pod oblak (Beneath the Cloud) (1997), Tarpenieto na kamaka (Patience of the Stone) (1998) and 1934 (1999). Warming Up Yesterday’s Lunch, his first feature film, is in the running for the Prix de la Première Oeuvre at Montreal.

Hungarian cinema is back on course again - with young filmmakers are leading the way. One glance at those award-winning feature films made by a trio of talented young independent directors over the past three years tells the whole story. First came Kornel Mundruczo (born 1975), whose Afta (Day by Day) (2000) caught the drudging atmosphere of small-town life in his depiction of a boy’s exploits on a blazing hot day. A year later, Mundruczo presented at the Hungarian Film Week in Budapest a film that split the critics right down the middle: Szep Napok (Pleasant Days) (2002), the story of a disturbed young girl who gives birth to a baby (on camera) at a laundromat, sells the infant to a colleague (who had faked her pregnancy), and then decides to wants her child back. That same 2002 Budapest festival launched the international career of György Palfi (born 1974), whose Hukkle (Hiccups) scored a stunning success as a riotous whodunnit about the mysterious deaths of the male population in a isolated village.

After György Palfi’s Hukkle (Hiccups) and Kornel Mundruczo’s Pleasant Days, both shot on shoestring budgets and each backed with plenty of creative imagination, along came another talented young filmmaker at this year’s Hungarian Film Week: Benedek Fliegauf (born 1974), whose Rengeteg (Forest) was awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Staudte Prize by the jury for the International Forum of Young Cinema at the Berlinale just a week after it had premiered at the Hungarian Film Week. On the surface, Forest can be taken as another of those Dogma films flooding the international festivals - save that the official "Dogma certificate" stopped at 31 when the Dogma 95 secretariat was dissolved in June of 2002.

"I had wanted to make a Dogma film for a long time, but never got the opportunity," said Fliegauf in an interview. "I had been carrying the screenplay around with me for quite some time, and one day I was lucky enough to stumble across a brilliant cameraman (Zoltan Lovasi) and an understanding producer, who secured the financial basis for the project." Forest - as in "you can’t see the trees for the forest" - is an episode film with seven different stories, which taken together portray from different perspectives the rather warped lives and dark mores of young people living in Budapest today. These fully urbanized post-communist youths talk about a dog left in an apartment, about a strange creature that wandered in through the door, about a waiter opening the belly of an oversized fish, about someone who took to shredding money instead of paper. Their conversations are as mundane as the individuals themselves. And that’s exactly what makes them - and the film - both absorbing to watch and provocative to reflect upon.

Dino Mustafic’s Remake, the first feature film produced and shot in Bosnia about the four-year siege of Sarajevo, is one of those outstanding moral and artistic films that unfortunately falls through the cracks at international film festivals. First offered to the Berlinale, the selection committee there sat on the film for months before making a decision that, in effect, read "no decision" - simply because war and suffering didn’t quite fit the "makeup" of a festival that caters to American releases, to say nothing of concern for possible demonstrations or the ruffling of feathers among international guestsn. So Remake premiered at Rotterdam, a few days before Berlin, and was promptly voted "Number Five" by the viewing audience! With those solid audience credentials, Remake was then offered to Karlovy Vary - only to be rejected "with deep regrets" by the festival directorate on nebulous FIAPF grounds. It appears that since the film had already been shown once outside of the country of production, it was not eligible for a so-called "A-Competition" festival. That rule, by the way, was overlooked by Cannes and Berlin on countless occasions in the past to assure the presence of a prominent start in an American film. But it could not be overlooked to accommodate a film about humanity and suffering.

The siege of Sarajevo is just one reason why Dino Mustafic’s Remake became overnight a major film event of 2003. That torturous siege, lasting four long years from 1992 to 1996, went down in modern history as the longest blockade of a major city throughout the entire 20th century. Indeed, Remake on these grounds alone should not be missed. After the international success of Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land, awarded Best Screenplay at the 2001 Cannes festival, it was only a matter of time before the theme of the siege would be addressed by another Bosnian filmmaker, one who had lived through the events depicted and could effectively disperse the ghosts of those trite dramas, slight-of-hand thrillers, and imitation epics spawn in the decade since the siege began.

Like the Tanovic forerunner, Remake is based on authentic events - in this case the autobiography of screenwriter Zlatko Topcic. Also, as the title hints, the "remake" theme refers back to similar events that had taken place in Sarajevo in 1943 during the Second World War. Further, there’s an added thematic twist that adds more psychological depth to the unique film-within-a-film-within-a-film that involves two sets of friends from the same Sarajevo neighborhood who end up on opposite sides of the conflict. For since the protagonist, Tarik Karaga (Ermin Bravo), just happens to be a budding screenwriter himself, it’s his award winning scenario that ultimately frees him, though only momentarily, from captivity and brings him to Paris.

When Tarik is asked by a French cultural representative to address the intellectual community about what he has seen and experienced, this scene of pompous civility is enough to send chills running up and down your back. Indeed, it goes straight to the heart of the matter - and strikes home as much today as the "Third Balkan War" did yesterday. In so many words an indifferent public is being asked: how many more"remakes" does humanity need to awaken from its slumber? After its world premiere and audience victory at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Remake has toured a score of international film festivals: Belgrade (where it was picked up for distribution), Munich (where it received a Special Jury Mention), Paris, Istanbul, Valencia Jove, Jerusalem, and Cluj in Transilvania, among others. Its North American premiere is taking place at the Montreal World Film Festival.

It’s the most successful - and the most expensive - production in Estonian film history. But within month after its premiere in Tallinn last November, practically the whole of the country’s movie-going population - a reported 200,000 (nearly twice as many as for Titanic) - has now seen Elmo Nüganen’s Nimed Marmortahvlil (Names in Marble), an Estonian-Finnish coproduction by a director making his feature film debut. Well it should be the most popular, for the war for independence in 1918-20 had long been forbidden as movie fare during the Soviet times. Furthermore, that war for independence touched Finland as well as Estonia during the interregnum period, so the option to coproduce with a windfall to assure quality credits in all production departments.

The scene is the city of Tartu in the fall of 1918. The city is still occupied by the Germans when a group of schoolboys raise an Estonian flag on the clock tower of city hall. Six months later, the same boys die in a fight-to-death conflict with Red Army troops who have just dethroned Tsar Nicholas II to begin the Communist Revolution. That’s only half of the story. The other half has to do with the brother-against-brother conflicts that divided several Estonian families during this two-year war for independence from 1918 to 1920. It should be noted, too, that the new Finnish government put its own integrity on the line by lending moral, medical, financial, and military support, including Finnish volunteers, to Estonian freedom-fighters during this time. And, in August of 1920, Finland recognized the independence of Estonian - the second nation after recognizing the Soviet Union.

Born 1962 in Johvi, Elmo Nüganen studied theater at the Pedagogical University of Tallinn and graduated from the Tallinn State Conservatory as an actor. Today he heads the Tallinn City Theater as artistic director. The young men playing the young volunteers were chosen from Nüganen’s own acting courses at the university. Names in Marble is the story of a poorly equipped band of 80,000 soldiers who fought for their freedom against a larger and better equipped Soviet Army that included not only Russians, but also Latvians and other revolutionaries from the Balticum who believed as much in the new Soviet power as they doubted the intentions of their own ruling classes. Not by chance, one boy discovers his own brother in the other trenches. The film was shot in southern Estonia, on sites where the original conflicts had actually taken place. The cameraman, Sergei Astakhov, is a Russian cinematographer.

"I know one of the junkyards in Lodz," said Piotr Trzaskalski about the inspiration for the making of Edi, last year’s Polish nomination for the Foreign Film Oscar. "Every morning, metal salvagers converge on it, arriving there drunk, almost unconscious. We didn’t want to confine ourselves to telling just the story of men who scour for scrap metal and then drink. It was then that I remembered a certain Buddhist dialogue, the hero of which, a wise man, is accused by a young girl of being the father of her child. Without uttering a word of opposition, he accepts the responsibility of caring for the child."

Before Edi was nominated as the Polish candidate for the Foreign Film Oscar, the film received an armful of national awards. It received a bundle of awards at the 2002 Gdynia Festival of Polish Feature Films: the Special Jury Award, plus the awards for Best Photography (Krzysztof Ptak), Best Art Direction (Wojciech Zogala), and Best Supporting Actor (Jacek Braciak), as well as the Polish Journalists Award. It also received the Grand Prix at last year’s Warsaw International Film Festival in the "New Films - New Directors" category. And it was awarded a share of the Philip Morris Film Award at this year’s Karlovy Vary film festival. Not bad for a director making his feature film debut.

Born in 1964 in Lodz, Piotr Trzaskalski first graduated in 1989 from the Cultural Studies Department at Lodz University before entering the Lodz Film School to study Film Directing, graduating in 1992. He also won a scholarship to study at the Leeds School of Film and Television in England, where he directed his first feature film, Someone (UK, 1993). Since 1992, he has worked as an independent artist, chiefly for Polish television, where he made a number of video-clips and documentaries, among them: The Heart of the Bell (1997), Further Than Vacations (1999), and Christmas Carol (2000).

Regarding Edi, his feature film debut, Piotr Trzaskalski had this to say: "Edi is an anachronism. It is a naive structure, as I know only too well. It’s another Winnetou story. Still all of us - Piotr Dzieciol (producer), Wojtek Lepianka (screenwriter), Krzysztof Ptak (cameraman), and myself - were brought up on Winnetou. For us, betrayal or disloyalty are something that just is not done." As for the story, it goes like this: Edi (Henryk Golebiewski) and Jureczek (Jacek Braciak) earn their living by salvaging scrap metal from the streets and trash dumps of Lodz. They live in a ruined factory building, where Edi is surrounded by his books, and they drink in a bar frequented by other metal salvagers, where they’re often beaten by two brothers who collect "tribute" for the illegal liquor distributed among the scrap-gatherers. One day, the brothers come to Edi with a peculiar proposal: they want him to tutor "Princess," their 17 year-old sister and ward, who likes a gypsy boyfriend more than school. However, when the brothers discover that the girl is pregnant, they accuse Edi of raping her, and their punishment is severe and brutal. And later, when the girl gives birth, the child is handed over to Edi to raise. A fairy tale, perhaps … except that this one doesn’t quite end there.

First, Larisa Sadikova, born 1963 in Briansk, was well known as an attractive actress, who had studied acting under Sergei Gerasimov at the Moscow Film School (VGIK). Later, she decided to follow the example of her mentor by changing, or modifying, her profession to become an equally talented film director. Russian cineastes will recall her performance in a supporting role in Gerasimov’s Leo Tolstoy (1984), the Crystal Globe winner at the Karlovy Vary film festival, following her graduation from VGIK in 1982. Then, as Soviet cinematography evolved to Russian independent filmmaking, she cofounded the Regional Public Fund for Supporting Film - and debuted as a film director with Happy Birthday (1998). Shot on a low budget in a maternity award, this fiction-documentary with comic touches and tragic moments chronicled the lives and aspirations of expectant mothers from different backgrounds and social standings, some of them in the hospital under rather traumatic circumstances. Happy Birthday, one of the discoveries at the 1998 Rotterdam film festival, went on from there to play the international festival circuit and won for the debutante some 30 awards. To some extent, the setting in a provincial hospital mirrored her own experiences.

Larisa Sadikova followed with a delightful comedy of manners: With Love, Lilly is again set in provincial Russia. Lilly (Marina Zubanova), an attractive redhead in her early thirties, works a menial job in a poultry processing plant. With little hope of betterment, she dreams of romance and is only too happy when a friend, a hotel receptionist, arranges dates for her with traveling salesmen - most of them, however, already married and rather vulgar in their romantic needs, to say nothing of having jealous wives. Even her romantic letters to would-be suitors remain unanswered. One day, a fortune teller informs Lilly that soon she will meet the man of her dreams - Boris, by name. So when she visits a concert, who should be on stage of a pianist named Boris. The coincidence is enough to set the ball rolling: she confides her fantasies to her friends and goes so far as to buy a wedding dress. Just when it looks like the prophecy is about to be fulfilled with lothario pianist, another "lonely hearts" appears upon the scene wearing the same wedding frock. Lilly, to her dismay, has picked the wrong Boris - she completely overlooked the friendly taxi-driver …

Memorable for a sparkling performance by comedienne Marian Zubanova, With Love, Lilly was again launched last year the Rotterdam film festival, was an award winner at the Kinoshock festival in Anapa, was invited to the East of the West section at Karlovy Vary, and is now on view in the Cinema of Europe section at the Montreal World Film Festival. Larisa Sadikova’s next project is another comedy - about a propaganda brigade on tour during World War Two.

Soumitra Chatterjee, that splendid actor whose presence graced the core of Satyajit Ray’s memorable films, can be seen in two Indian films at the 27th Montreal World Film Festival: Goutam Ghose’s Abar Aranye (In the Forest … Again), selected for the Competition, and Anjan Das’s Saanjhbathir Roopkathara (Strokes and Silhouettes), programmed in the Cinema of Asia section. Since both entries were produced in Kolkata (Calcutta), it bodes well for the current vitality of Bengali cinema. Furthermore, the Bengal directors don’t shy away from presenting delicate scenes of intimacy on the Indian screen - kisses, embraces, amours, infidelity, sex, coitus - provided these scenes are an integral part of the plot and are handled tastefully by the filmmakers.

In Strokes and Silhouettes veteran director Anjan Das explores the mores of a artist family in Kolkata. Tukum (Indrani Haldar) is born at twilight into the family of a prominent artist - her given name "Saanjhbathi" means "twilight lamp" - and grows up listening to her father Saikat (Soumitra Chatterjee) talk about the mysteries of creation, words that also reflect the mysterious world of "strokes and silhouettes" on his canvas. Now in her twenties, Tukum is unable to find her place in the world and longs for both a great love and spiritual fulfillment. The turmoil in her subconscience is accompanied by fantasies and daydreams, "silhouettes" of her imagination.One day, she becomes infatuated with a young man, who then spoils the relationship by trying to rape her. Her trauma increases when the family relationship, particularly the trust between father and daughter, disintegrates before her very eyes. Her mother has discovered Saikat in bed with a family friend, and dies soon afterwards. Her ideals shattered, Tukum has to pick up the pieces and start over again.

Anjan Das, trained as a pharmacist, entered cinema by working as an assistant to noted documentary filmmaker Bidhuti Roy. After directing a number of industrial films and commercials for television, he moved on to telefeatures and TV series for Bengali Television. His best known films were The Soldier and Janma before he scored a festival and box office hit with Strokes and Silhouettes, a poetic film praised by Indian critics for its lyricism and blending of literary and visual art forms.

During the oppressive years of the Marcos regime, Philippine cinema mostly meant Lino Brocka, whose Insiang (1977), the story of a young girl growing up in the slums of Manila, was one of the hits of the Directors Fortnight at the 1978 Cannes festival. It awakened festival audiences to a talented, until then relatively unknown, Asian director (born 1940) who could effectively make creative films that walked the thin line between social problems and political issues. Brocka was back in Cannes again in 1980, this time in the competition, with Jaguar - followed by Bayan Ko in the 1984 competition, and then an invitation to serve on the international jury at Cannes in 1986. He is also remembered for L’Insoumis (Fight For Us) (1989), a French-Philippine coproduction about the terror and lawlessness sweeping the country following the fall of Marcos.

Another veteran Philippine director, Maryo J. de los Reyes (born 1952 in Manila), made a name for himself with a string of mainstream entertainment productions. Credited (at last count) with 56 feature films and 38 television shows, de los Reyes studied cinema at the Institute of Mass Communications at the University of the Philippines, joined the stage troupe PETA, penned a screenplay (Disco Fever), helped form the Agrix production company, and debuted as a feature film director with High School Circa ’65 (1979). He has won 14 national awards for his feature films, among these: Diosa (The Goddess) (1985), My Other Woman (1990), Sa paraiso ni Efren (1999), Red Diaries (2001), Bedtime Stories (2002), Laman (Flesh) (2002), and Magnifico (2002). Magnifico was invited to compete at this year’s Karlovy Vary film festival.

"When I read the script by Michiko Yamamoto for the first time, I cried and vowed I would do it," said Maryo J. de los Reyes about the making of Magnifico. When the script was awarded first prize in 2000 at the Film Development Foundation of the Philippines, de los Reyes was one of the jury members. A simple story, it has a poignant emotional twist: a nine-year-old boy - named Magnifico (Jiro Manio) - from a poor family wants to provide a fitting and a proper casket for his ailing grandmother, who is dying of cancer. Since the family has other financial worries - Magnifico’s sister has cerebral palsy and his older brother has lost his school scholarship - he works every odd job he can find to raise the money he needs to help the family. Nothing seems to daunt his will to overcome all obstacles. But in the end fate will play a harsh hand of its own.

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 Road to 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.

Hana Makhmalbaf - the youngest member of the family - joined the circle of filmmakers at Film House Makhmalbaf at the tender age of ten. The story goes that she picked up a video camera as a play-toy and, with the help of her father and brother, shot The Day My Aunt Was Ill (1998) - whereupon this 26-minute short film about "playing with a camera" was invited for screenings at Locarno and Pusan. This year, Hana’s Joy of Madness, a 73-minute chronicle of how her sister Samira had casted nonprofessional actors for At Five in the Afternoon, is competing at Venice in the Opera Prima section. The two films can be seen back-to-back at Montreal.

At 18, Samira Makhmalbaf was 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. For like her father, she 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 his projects.

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, 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 at the Cannes film festival.

Invited to compete at this year’s Karlovy Vary film festival, Behesht ja-ye digari ast! (Paradise Is Somewhere Else) introduced an Iranian documentary filmmaker making his debut as a 43-year-old feature film director. Born 1960 in Shiraz, Abdolrasoul Golbon began working in television after his cinema studies at the university. He has directed several shorts and documentaries for Iranian Television, the best known being the episode The Epic of Sousangerd in the TV series titled The Chronicle of Victory.

Queried in an interview about the reasons for making Paradise Is Somewhere Else, Abdolrasoul Golbon responded: "The world is full of different aims and dreams. And everyone, with each thought and belief, is searching for a lost thing or a new horizon in life. In this film we have a look at people’s efforts to obtain a better opportunity." Set in a rural community, the story takes on color and atmosphere as the camera (Mohammad Davoudi) captures details of shepherding goats over a dry, arid terrain.

Edok (Yar-Mohammad Damanipour) is a 17-year-old goatherd who has had enough of his dull routines and a village life in which nothing ever changes. Instead, he want to leave Iran for the Emirates, where he believes he can find a better job, to say nothing of a better future. But the family is poor and needs his input. Just as he hits on a plan to leave, his father is brutally killed in what appears to be more than just an accident. Edok’s relatives demand revenge, which would mean to ambush and kill the alleged killer, a man he hardly knows. With this extra burden placed his shoulders, young Edok has to make the decision of his lifetime: to stay or leave, to take the place of his father in the family or to suffer the pain of cutting himself off entirely from the village and its traditions.

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 small 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 completing his studies in cinema, he made the documentary L’état de crise (State of Crisis) (1984), which was 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 International Critics Week at Cannes provided an opportune platform to premiere his debut feature.

"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 theSouth (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."

Want to know who were the charter members of the "Kazakh New Wave" that took the Sundance film festival by storm back in 1988? Although they were not all the same age, most had assisted Sergei Solovyov on The Wild Pigeon (1985), a Mosfilm feature he had shot in Kazakhstan in 1984. Solovyov then invited them to take courses under his aegis at the Moscow Film School (VGIK). And within a couple years they were well known on the festival circuit for making films drawn from their everyday lives and national culture.

Rachid Nugmanov (born 1954) was the first to win international recognition at VGIK with Ya-Ha (1986), an improvised 40-minute fiction-documentary about underground rock-bands shot in the cellars of Leningrad (today St. Petersburg). Then came Igla (The Needle) (1988), an avant-garde, drugs-and-gangsters feature film starring rock-star Victor Tsoi. When The Needle was released, it caught fire and drew an overall audience of circa 25 million. With a thousand prints were in circulation, it turned out to be one of the most successful productions in Soviet film history.

Abai Karpikov (born 1955) portrayed the pessimism of Kazakh youth in Little Fish in Love (1989). Ardak Amirkulov (born 1955) directed The Fall of Atrar (1991), the first genuine Kazakh epic. Bakhyt Kalibaev (born 1958) collaborated with Alexander Baranov on Three (1988), a satirical spoof about filming on location in Kazakhstan. Darezhan Omirbaev (born 1958), editor of the New Film journal, was recognized as a genuine auteur after the international success of his brilliant debut short, Summer Heat (aka July) (1988) and his autobiographical feature, Kairat (1991), winner of the Silver Leopard at the 1992 Locarno film festival. Serik Aprimov (born 1960) took the pulse of the decaying Soviet empire in The Last Stop (1989). And Amir Karakulov (born 1966), the youngest of the group, directed a sophisticated psycho-drama, A Woman between Two Brothers (1991). To these should be added two more Kazakh filmmakers who had preceded the others to VGIK: Yermek Shinarbaev (born 1953), whose The Place on the Tricorne (1993) forms a kind of thematic trilogy with Omirbaev’s Kairat and Karakulov’s A Woman between Two Brothers, and Talgat Temenov (born 1954), whose award-winning children’s film Wolf-Cub among Men (1989) was shot in a Kazakh village.

Born in Alma Ata (today Almaty), Amir Karakulov studied journalism at the University of Kazakhstan before enrolling for film courses at VGIK. His short film Leaves (1989) was invited to several international film festivals. It was followed by the features A Woman between Two Brothers (1991), awarded the International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at Moscow, The Doves’ Bell Ringer (1993), The Last Holidays (1996), Poslednye Kanikuly (1999), and now Jylama (Don’t Cry) (2003). In Don’t Cry Maira (Maira Mukhamededkyzy), a Chinese-trained opera singer living in a remote Kazakh village in the mountains near the Chinese border, is told by the doctors that she will risk losing her voice if she continues to sing. Added to her troubles are an aged grandmother (Bakira Shakhninbayeva ) and an ailing niece (Bibniur Aldabergenova). To obtain the medicine she needs, Maira sells her concert dresses and donates her blood, but fate will soon deal her another severe hand. Shot with a digital camera - by cameraman Murat Nugmanov, Rachid’s brother - Don’t Cry is a simple, poetic, minimalist film along the lines of a fiction-documentary.

The birth of "Chinese Independent Cinema" - namely, those feature films made outside of the official studio system but with official government sanction - can be marked with the recent release of Lu Xuechang’s Ka la shi tiao gou (Cala, My Dog!), a runaway box office hit that can now be seen on select Asian airline flights. As for how it was possible to shoot Cala, My Dog! on the streets of Beijing without police interference, this can be traced to the passing in February 2002 of a new production law that allowed independent companies to make films on their own. Up to that time, independent-minded producers and directors were forced either to work in tandem with a state-approved studio or to go "underground" and make films that could be shown abroad at international festivals but were refused a release license for the home market. Now, however, due to the phenomenal box office success of Cala, My Dog!, it appears that the number of national films in production is sure to increase - simply because independent companies are not obliged to go through the formality of working with a studio.

When Cala, My Dog! premiered last February at the Berlinale in the International Forum of Young Cinema, where 19 Asian features and six documentaries were programmed, it was welcomed by an enthusiastic audience. The same thing happened a few weeks later when it officially closed the Hong Kong film festival. Shortly thereafter, it was picked up by Celestial Pictures for worldwide inflight screenings on major airlines. As for the film’s director, Lu Xeuchang, he was born in 1964 in Beijing. After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1981, he enrolled in 1985 at Beijing Film Academy and in 1991 joined the Beijing Film Studio as a director. His best known film before Cala, My Dog! was The Making of Steel (1995).

So why is Cala, My Dog! currently riding a wave of audience popularity? According to producer Feng Xiaogang, who in his own right is mainland China’s top box-office director, "Cala, My Dog! is a very human film. It may look like a movie about the search of dog, but in fact, it’s about people. It’s about the extraordinary struggle of an ordinary worker to reclaim his pet from the Beijing authorities. It is artistic and poignant in its realism. The traditional lines between drama, comedy, and tragedy are blurred. The film delivers on many metaphorical levels and has audiences talking - and thinking - long after they leave the theater."

Furthermore, Cala, My Dog! features in the main role one of China’s best known actors: Ge You, who was awarded Best Actor at the 1994 Cannes festival for the lead role in Zhang Yimou’s Huozhe! (Live!) (Hong Kong/China). This time, Ge You plays Lao Er, an ordinary factory employee, who every day plods along between the modest family home and a nondescript job at a factory. While his pudgy wife (Ding Jiali) and indolent 14-year-old son (Li Bin) find ways to lay an extra burden on his shoulders, Lao Er's only pleasure is Cala, the family dog. One night in the mid-1990s, just when the new law "Regarding the Strict Limitation on Dog-Owning in Beijing Municipality" goes into effect, the family makes the mistake of taking the dog for a walk - only to have it unregistered dog picked up by the police. Lao Er is given until four the next afternoon to pay 5000 yen for the registration fee or lose the dog. Since the fine matches the cost of feeding his family for the next six months, Lao Er laments that he may never be able to raise the money. Refusing to give up, however, he embarks on a frantic quest for advice and assistance - from strangers, officials, friends, acquaintances, passers-by - as the 4pm deadline draws closer and closer. Sound familiar? In Bicycle Thief (Italy, 1948) and Umberto D (Italy, 1952), Vittorio de Sica’s postwar neorealist classics, the story was pretty much the same.

Month of Ramadan in Morocco: Faouzi Bensaidi’s Mille Mois (A Thousand Months) (Morocco/France/Belgium)

"The film opens in a precise religious and political setting, the start of the month of Ramadan in Morocco in 1981," said Faouzi Bensaidi about his debut feature Mille Mois (A Thousand Months). And he added: "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.

"Since we all know what violence is, we didn’t think it needed to be re-enacted on the screen," said writer-director Stuart McKenzie about the making of For Good, the story of a 13-year-old, outdoor-sports-girl abducted while on horseback, then raped and murdered. "But we did want to show the reality of a hellish situation" - namely, what goes through people’s minds when the killer is up for parole ten years later. A New Zealand production programmed in the Cinema of Oceania section, For Good was a critical and audience hit at the recent Welllington film festival. One reason for its success is its authenticity: the story is drawn from actual court cases dealing with child abuse, rape, and murder. In short, the filmmakers have effectively rubbed out the lines between fiction and reality.

"Let’s just say For Good is a cross between Gary Oldham’s Nil by Mouth (UK, 1997) and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (USA, 1991), offered Miranda Harcourt, who plays the victim’s mother and collaborated with Stuart McKenzie on adapting her theatrical performance from stage to screen. "It’s a psycho-thriller, of course. But since it digs deeper and touches some pretty raw emotions, it’s a film wrapped in a social realist context." In other words, the story is carved out of interviews with families who have suffered both as victims and offenders in crimes of a highly volatile nature - namely, sex offenses that lead to the murder of children and youths. Nearly every line spoken in the film is based on these interviews.

The setting is a small town. It’s a decade after 13-year-old Tracy Hill had been murdered, and the family and community are confronted anew by the possibility that the killer Grant Wilson (Tim Balme), now up for parole, might be on the loose again. The father (Tim Gordon) swears revenge, the mother (Miranda Harcourt) is equally devastated, and an inquiring reporter happens on the scene with a mysterious letter in her hand. It soon surfaces that the journalist, Lisa Pense (Michelle Langstone), is anything but what she pretends to be. Rather, the 23-year-old was born on the same day as Tracy, and the circumstances of her childhood companion’s abhorrent death has had an impact on her own development. So she visits the killer and talks to the parents, thus drawing the audience too into the maelstrom of ragged emotions and torn consciences. How these conflicts are resolved is what makes For Good a film of quest, an open-ended dialogue between good and evil, a moral tale of transgression and redemption (as its title hints).

"The subject matter of For Good is no more extreme than your average crime thriller, but it is different in that I have tried to remain sensitive to the quality of real lives and real voices," summarized Stuart McKenzie. "I want people to be left with a sense of loss painfully acknowledged and in this way reveal strength, not hopelessness."

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Stuart McKenzie studied comparative religions and creative writing before embarking on a varied career as a writer, playwright, and filmmaker. Collaborating with producer Neil Pardington, he has directed a number of short films, among these the awarded The Mouth and the Truth (1991), Ends Meat (1992), Snap (1995), Chinese Whispers (1996), and Voiceover (1997). For Good, his first feature film, is in the running for the Prix de la Première Oeuvre at Montreal.

Argentinian directors have been welcomed guests at Montreal and major international film festivals over the past couple years. In 2001, Lisandro Alonso debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 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 at Cannes - and the Latin American Cinema section at Montreal. 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 at Cannes and the Cinema of the Americas at Montreal. Again, it’s the story of someone down on their luck at a time when people are begging on the streets in Buenos Aires 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 Prix de la Première Oeuvre at Montreal.

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

As for Between Cyclones, Colina’s first feature, it’s a film he’s 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 meagre 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 personalities."

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 number 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.

It may seem a bit odd that this highly informative documentary on Iranian Women Filmmakers (UK/Iran, 2002) was made by two male Iranian directors, Hamid Khairoldin and Majid Khabazan. So, too, the fact that all three critics and historians - Laura Mulvey, Sheila Whitaker, and Rose Issa - are female, based in London, and seemingly feminist in their comments on the key women filmmakers chosen for the documentary. But no matter - the documentary contains a splendid collection of excerpts from films made by Rakshan Bani Etemad, Tahmineh Milani, Shirin Neshat, Samira Makhmalbaf, Fatemeh Motamed Aria, and Niki Karimi. Two other feminine members of the Makhmalbaf family don’t figure prominently in the film: Hana Makhmalbaf, the younger sister of Samira, and Merziyeh Meshkini, married to Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the mother of Samira and Hana.

A decade ago, Cinemaya, the Asian film journal edited by Aruna Vasudev out of New Delhi, printed a feature essay on Iranian women directors - and interest has grown ever since. Most critics agree that Rakhshan Bani Etemad is, by far, the most important and politically motivated of the group. "I have not become a filmmaker for the sake of cinema," she says in an interview. "I found cinema the best way for presenting social issues." A filmmaker who worked her way up from script girl to assistant director to documentaries for television, it took her eight years to find the backing for her first feature film: Off Limits (1986), a portrait of poverty and an attack on bureaucracy. Next came The Blue-Veiled (1995), a powerful film that centered on the plight of women in Iran; it was awarded a Bronze Leopard at Locarno and a FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at Thessaloniki. Montreal audiences may well remember The May Lady (1998), a semi-autobiographical statement that was awarded here the FIPRESCI Prize, and Under the Skin of the City, awarded the Special Jury Prize at Moscow and the NETPAC Award at Karlovy Vary.

As for Tahmineh Milani, she was once arrested - in September of 2001 - for having directed The Hidden Half, a film that clearly fought for the equal rights of women in Iran. The film was already in release in Tehran when she was thrown in jail by the hard-line Tehran Revolutionary Court for "abusing the arts as an tool for actions which will suit the taste of counter-revolutionary and ‘mohrab’ (war against God) groups." A solidarity declaration signed by several prominent international film personalities eventually helped to secure her release. This was the first time that the current Iranian government had taken such a stand against a filmmaker - but then by the hard-line Tehran Revolutionary Court for "abusing the arts as an tool for actions which will suit the taste of counter-revolutionary and ‘mohrab’ (war against God) groups."

Shirin Neshat is perhaps the least known of those presented in Iranian Women Filmmakers. Born in Iran, the artist-photographer-filmmaker moved to New York to study art - and stayed there after the Islamic Revolution took over her native country. But she has maintained contact with her culture and the destiny of Iranian women over the years. Her Women of Allah (1993-97), a photographic collection, depicts militant Muslin women and examines the Islamic idea of maryrdom. In 1996, he turned to filmmaking and produced a trilogy of split-screen video installations: Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999), and Fervor (2000) - taken together, they constitute a profound meditation on male/female dynamics in Islamic society.

As for the sisters Samira and Hana Makhmalbaf, their latest films have been reported on in issue five of Cine-Festival.