53rd International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg
November 18-27, 2004

Ecumenical Awards

Members of the jury: Alain Le Goanvic (France), Alfred Jokesch (Austria), Dr. Dorothea Schmitt-Hollstein (Germany), Christine Stark (Switzerland), Lothar Strüber (Germany)

The Ecumenical Award, provided with a prize money of 1500.- € by the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) and the German Catholic Church, the Jury has given to

Mila ot Mars - Mila from Mars - Mila vom Mars
by Zornitsa Sophia, Bulgaria 2004

The film follows a young woman on her difficult path towards finding her own identity in a solitary place through her encounters with other human beings. This multi-facetted debut feature plays with traditional Christian motives. Image composition, montage and the actor’s performance are compelling.

Summary:
A 16-old girl runs away from a dangerous man and gets into a faraway village near the border. Soon she finds out the only inhabitants there - nine old men and women - make their living by growing marihuana and the village is actually an illegal plantation belonging to the man she runs away from. However, she decides to stay there and nothing remains the same. A girl is afraid of her past, both disgusting and attracting her. She is afraid of her present, both suffocating her and giving her wings. And she is afraid of the future as it projects both her nightmares and her dreams. This film is about the only `bullet against fear` - love. (Internet Movie Data Base)

The film also got the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Award of the International Festival Jury.

In addition, the Ecumenical Jury decided to give a Commendation to the film

Nema Problema - No problems - Keine Probleme
by Giancarlo Bocchi, Italy 2004

The film uses stringent imagery to depict the difficulties of journalistic work during times of war. It spotlights the interplay of mutual manipulations and reminds us that the quest for truth must always be the unconditional concern of any democracy.

53rd Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival
Report by Ron Holloway

It was a festival of reunions – and record-breaking attendance. All thanks to the “Master of Cinema” tributes to Wim Wenders and Edgar Reitz organized by Michael Kötz in his tenth season as director of the 53rd Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival (18-27 November 2004). Of course, hardly anyone in the audience at the Wenders press conference would remember the 1968 Mannheim screening of Wim’s Same Player Shoots Again, an experimental short constructed around a single static shot of a man with a gun crossing a street, a shot that’s repeated over and over again in different shadings of light. Its title is taken from the name of a favorite pinball machine, the “flipper” that the young, long-haired, revolutionary, aspiring filmmaker at the München Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film had mastered to pay for a round of beers. “As a matter of fact,” mused Wenders at Mannheim, “I pretty much ‘flipped’ my way through studies at the HFF.” Today a cult director. Wim Wenders could bask in a pair of packed screenings at Mannheim-Heidelberg for the German-language release of his Land of Plenty (Germany/USA) and (the icing on the cake) the Director’s Cut of his 291-minute (!) Bis ans Ende der Welt (Until the End of the World) (German/France/Australia, 1991). For the record, the extra hour or so didn’t add much to the overall viewing experience of Until the End of the World, the one film that casts a long shadow over Wenders’s celebrated career.

For the Edgar Reitz “Master of Cinema” tribute, Mannheim-Heidelberg programmed the entire length of his monumental village chronicle covering some 80 years of the past century. Heimat – Eine Chronik (Heimat – A Chronicle) (1981-84), running 16 hours in eleven episodes, covers forty years from 1919 to the 1959. Die zweite Heimat – Chronik einer Jugend (The Second Heimat – Chronicle of a Youth) (1988-91), running just over 25 hours in 13 episodes, covers the decade from 1960 to 1970, the heyday of New German Cinema as part of a cultural renaissance in the arts. And Heimat 3 – Chronik einer Zeitenwende (Heimat 3 – A Chronicle of Endings and Beginnings) (2001-03), running just over 11 hours in six episodes, begins with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and ends up pretty close to the present day. Altogether, the Heimat marathon totals 52 hours of viewing time. Also, since the last six films in Heimat 3 are scheduled for prime television in the month of December, some cineastes at Mannheim-Heidelberg welcomed the refresher course that the entire cycle provided. Another fortuitous ploy: Michael Kötz invited actor Henry Arnold, who plays Herrmännchen (the alter ego for Edgar Reitz) in the later Heimat episodes, was invited to serve on the international jury.

Welcomed at Mannheim as a “Master of Cinema,” Edgar Reitz recounted in an all-embracing press conference his own past as a boy growing up in the village of Hunsrück (Schabbach in the film). He sketched how the original Heimat made media headlines, citing the sale of the entire series to BBC at the 1984 Venice festival. Back then, while serving as an American member of the International Critics Jury, I remember voting Heimat a share of the FIPRESCI Prize. As I recall too, the Venice critics were also unstinting in their praise for the collaborators on the Reitz epic: screenwriter Peter Steinbach, cameraman Gernot Roll, and actress Marita Breuer, who aged in a remarkable way on screen from a young girl to an elderly family matron. Reitz at Mannheim was particularly eloquent in recounting the tribulations of the young German filmmakers after the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, announcing that “Papas Kino ist tot!” (Papa’s cinema is dead!). In one episode of The Second Heimat, it should be noted, a fictional event is reconstructed around the actual München screening of Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni’s controversial documentary Brutalität in Stein (Brutality in Stone) back in 1960. It brought to mind the equally important Mannheim Declaration of 1967, the festival thrust that propelled the New German Cinema movement into the illustrious 1970s. So when Reitz wrapped his press conference with a plaidoyer for the lasting integrity of the writer-director – “I am happy to see that the Autorenfilm is still with us!” – the cineastes in the audience spontaneously applauded.

The International Jury – numbering Kit Carson, who had cowritten with James McBride the screenplay for David Holzman’s Diary, the top winner at the 1967 Mannheim festival – awarded its Main Prize to Mona J. Hoel’s Salto, salmiakk og kaffe! (Chlorox, Ammonia and Coffee!) (Norway). An engaging comedy about everyday provincial life in Norway, Chlorox, Ammonia and Coffee marked the third reunion of Hoel at Mannheim-Heidelberg. Back in 1995, her At Ease was a hit at the festival, followed by the equally popular Cabin Fever in 2001. Another Norwegian entry, Annette Sjursen’s Min misunnelige Frisör (My Jealous Barber) (Norway), a hilarious tale about a barber trying every ploy in the book to keep his last customer from departing for the new salon owner around the corner, confirms Norway as a fertile filmland for the comédie humaine, to say nothing of its penchant for backing talented women directors.

As for the key film at the festival, if not the most entertaining, Srdjan Koljevic’s Sivi kamion crvene boje (Red Colored Grey Truck) (Serbia & Montenegro/Slovenia/Germany) introduces a Belgrade director to keep an eye on. Often acclaimed for his screenplays for awarded films by other directors from Serbia/Montenegro, Koljevic had previously scripted Oleg Novkovic’s Why Have You Left Me? (1993) and Normal People (2000), Gorcin Stojanovic’s Premeditated Murder (1996) and The Hornet (1998), and Ljubisa Samardzic’s Sky Hook (2000) and Natasha (2001). Red Colored Grey Truck, an absurd slapstick road movie about the farcical circumstances that had prompted the Third Balkan War, depicts two winsome, idiotic losers – one a color-blind truck driver without a driver’s license, the other a beanhead hippy running away from a pregnancy – on a zigzag trip across a Yugoslavia that’s about to explode for reasons nobody in the film really knows or understands. Red Colored Grey Truck was awarded ta share of the Audience Prize and was cited with a Special Mention by the International Jury for “its comic approach to an outrageous world.”

Another outstanding festival film, Miro Bilbrough’s Floodhouse (Australia) is directed by a poet and former art curator who made a name for herself first as a film critic and then as the director of two short films: Urn (1995), a screen adaptation of one of her poems, and Bartleby (2000), an adaptation of a Herman Melville short story. Her Floodhouse, a coming-of-age short feature anchored to poetic dialogue and metaphorical images, draws upon Bilbrough’s own teenage experiences in a New Zealand hippy commune and is awe-inspiring for its frank honesty. Shot originally on Super-16, the 52-minute feature unfortunately never made it to the final print stage. Still, as a Betacom SP presentation at Mannheim-Heidelberg, Floodhouse is one of those films you want to see again. A “fresh young storyteller,” cited the International Jury in its Special Mention. Miro Bilbrough is all of that – if not more.

AWARDS

Grand Prize – Best Feature Film
Salto, salmiakk og kaffe! (Chlorox, Ammonia and Coffee) (Norway), Mona J. Hoel

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Prize
Mila ot Mars (Mila from Mars) (Bulgaria), Sophia Zornitsa
 
Special Jury Prizes
Doo Wop (France), David Lanzmann
Min misunnelige Frisör (My Jealous Barber) (Norway), Annette Sjursen
On the Corner (Canada), Nathaniel Geary

Special Mentions
Floodhouse (Australia), Miro Bilbrough
Sivi kamion crvene boje (Red Colored Grey Truck) (Serbia & Montenegro/Slovenia/Germany), Srdjan Koljevic

Best Short Film Prize
Like Twenty Impossibles (Palestine/USA), Annemarie Jacir
Special Mention
W(it)h (USA), Hunter Carson

International Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize
Doo Wop (France), David Lanzmann

Ecumenical Prize
Mila ot Mars (Mila from Mars) (Bulgaria), Sophia Zornitsa
Commendation
Nema Problema (No problems) (Italy), Giancarlo Bocchi

Audience Award – ex aequo
Folge der Feder (Follow the Feather) (Germany), Nuray Sahin
Sivi kamion crvene boje (Red Colored Grey Truck) (Serbia & Montenegro/Slovenia/Germany), Srdjan Koljevic