Festival Report

5th Ecumenical Award

The Award of the Ecumenical Jury went to the film

Štestí (Something Like Happiness)
by Bohdan Sláma, Czech Republic/Germany 2005

which shows relations and events of everyday life realistically, able to create life with a place for something like happiness.

Synopsis: Somewhere at the outskirts of a derelict industrial town people live in ugly concrete apartment buildings and they earn their living in the local factory or hypermarket. Angelic Monika, willing to sacrifice her happiness for others, also works here. And so she helps the mentally unstable Dasha and as soon as the ill woman is taken to a mental asylum, she starts taking care of her two young sons. She postpones her own American future alongside her successful boyfriend indefinitely and moves with the children into the derelict house of her friend Toník, an exemplary outsider who has been in love with her for years… (Festival information)

In addition, the Ecumenical Jury awarded a Special Mention to the film

Moartea domnului Lazarescu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu)
by Cristi Puiu, Romania 2005

which shows the dangers of bureaucratization of health care system and the power of one courageous person to oppose it; an image very well known to each of us.

Synopsis: Mr. Lazarescu is 63 and lives in a forlorn apartment house with his three cats. His wife died eight years ago and his daughter moved to Canada. It is Saturday evening, Mr. Lazarescu is not feeling well and calls an emergency services. He is out of the pills he needs therefore he asks his neighbors for help. Interrupted from their homely quietude they think that the old man is a bit drunk.The ambulance finally comes and an absurd hospital odyssey begins when doctors can`t name or diagnose the right treatment. The doctors remain careless and Mr. Lazarescu gets lost deeper and deeper into a Bucharest night... „The film tells a story about the world where love for a neighbor does not exist. Somebody needs help but everybody around ignores him.“ (Cristi Puiu)

The members of the Ecumenical Jury were Albert H. van den Heuvel (The Netherlands), Nathalie Roncier (France), Roman Tarina (Slowakia).

A successful event
A personal report on the International Film Festival in Bratislava from December 2005, 2-10
by Albert van den Heuvel

The 7th Bratislava International Film Festival (2-10 December 2005) was a successful event. The Ecumenical Jury consisted of Nathalie Roncier (France), Roman Tarina (Slovakia) and Albert van den Heuvel (The Netherlands), which made for efficient and amicable relations. All decisions were unanimously taken and relations with other jurors (official and press) were friendly and content-oriented.

The programme itself - in the midst of a wealth of non-competition films - concentrated on 18 films that in my opinion were quite uneven in quality. The first days the jury even feared that no clear prize winning film would emerge. The festival organisers had decided - so we were told - to begin with the more difficult films and so they did.

We were confronted with a number of moody films in which violence was a recurrent theme, often crudely and cruelly presented. The somewhat boring despair of modern people was omnipresent: when one has seen one, one has seen all. In the Eastern European films much same gender sex (male) and even incest were treated in a way that gave the impression of subjecting the viewer to secular sermons often combined with actual or threatening violence.

A number of films began quite comically and lightly but hardened in the process, as if the makers did not dare to treat heavy questions with a certain lightness. Films with a comic beginning, slowly dropping towards a gloomy end, seldom convince. On the whole the treatment of nature was also disappointing. Life is threatened by the out-door life many films seem to say.

At the same time animals - and especially dogs! - played a prominent role as man’ s best friend. In film language prominent animals often serve to underline people’s essential loneliness. The whole gives the impression that safety lies in close quarters, while great threats come from the outside, a view which is dominant in European thinking in general. Fighting and loving take place in small spaces.

Of course there are exceptions too: the remake of the Robinson Crusoe story Vendredi ou un autre Jour by Yvan Le Moine is a good example of a film in which nature plays an important role. In the Mongolian film, The cave of the Yellow dog by Byambasuren Davaa (maker of The Weeping Camel), nature is also present in glorious colours. But these two films are exceptions for more than one reason.

But much of what we saw was misery. Zakareisvili’s Tbilisi –Tbilisi, Argentina’s Gemini, Rahmin Bharani’s Man Push Cart, Ghasemi’s Written Of The Earth, Amma Asante’s Way of Life had little to offer besides gloom and sadness. Only the US film Good night, good luck by George Clooney was a straightforward positive movie about a heroic reporter fighting MacCarthy bigotry and winning. It was well filmed in the style of the famous TV series The Untouchables: much black and white photography, the central character without family, fault or humour: American hagiography at its best.

Many films gave the impression of having been made for TV rather than the cinema, with more performance than acting, characters shown but not developed, large numbers of fleeting characters used in small parts, often reminding the viewers of those telenovellas designed to keep the audience glued to their seats rather than to look into their motives or characters.

In the Russian film Garpastum by Alexej German the pregnant historical moment between the tsarist and soviet era is filmed through they eyes of e few foot-balling friends and becomes more scenery than reality. The viewer has to decide whether the filmmaker wants us to believe that history is bunk or that the tsarist regime crumbled because the bourgeoisie did not perceive its historical decline. In any case the film is too long. And that was true of most films of the films we saw.

The Grand Prix went to The Cave of the Yellow Dog, the Mongolian-German entry by Byambasuren Davas. Indeed a beautiful film about a nomadic family living in the open valleys of Mongolia whose six year old daughter, Nansal, finds a yellow dog in a cave and takes it home. Her father, fearing an alliance then or later between the dog and the dangerous wolves around threatening their tent and herd, orders her to take the dog back. The little girl keeps the dog hidden. When her father returns and the family starts to move again the dog is left behind, but after it protects the baby of the family against vultures it is, of course, taken in as the hero of the film.

The film is impeccably made: father, mother and children (and the dog!) show us their way of life very naturally. There are clever footnotes filmed to show the closeness of city life, the martyr way in which father and mother raise their three children. The character of the six year old daughter, faithful, caring and curious at the same time, is skilfully depicted. The Ecumenical Jury thought the film too paradisal. It was a film about the past catering to melancholy and memory more than to modern life. We were glad that the main jury picked it up though.

The Press Award by Fipresci went (unanimously) to what many of us though was the most intriguing film of the lot: Everything is Illuminated by Liev Schreiber, an American Jewish filmmaker, who has already played in 40 movies. His film had already won the Lanterna Magica Award in Venice. The film is an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same title. In it a young American Jew goes back to the Ukraine to find a woman who saved his grandfather’s life during the war between the Soviet Union and Germany. The story is moving enough but the film derives its beauty from the humour with which it is told.

The film is also difficult in a sense. It requires quite some knowledge of the Jewish religion to fully understand its story. In the end the old tourist guide revisits the village that was destroyed by the Germans and where there appears to be only one survivor. He is a Jew himself, a fact he had hidden all his life.

We did not give the Ecumenical prize to this film for two reasons: the end of the film shows a suicide which is hard to explain to any audience let alone a Christian one. The second reason was more convincing to me: the film requires too much knowledge of Jewish faith and practice. It is not a ‘universal’ film and, therefore, not suited to an international prize. But it is an intriguing film.

The Ecumenical Award went to another film, which was closer to the human condition, less spectacular but still carefully made. With Something Like Happiness (Stesti) Bohdan Slama made a film about people who live in a depressing building situated in a derelict industrial town. All kinds of people appear: an angelic girl who takes care of everybody even at the expense of her own happiness, a friend of hers who is a sympathetic loser, a drunken father, a disappointed mother, a very unstable neighbouring woman, a horrible macho shop manager… All the ingredients for a soap opera and yet it does not become one.

Slama succeeds in making a film in which through the misery there is always a shimmering of hope. It shows that people can survive if there is someone who lets the law of love and care govern his or her life. There is real acting in the film and convincing camerawork. We were moved by it and that was more than we could say about most films.

We also gave a commendation to the Romanian film The Death of Mr Lazarescu, by Cristi Puiu. The film is about an older man living by himself who runs out of the pills necessary for his heart condition. He asks for a doctor and after some dallying by his neighbours a friendly lady assistant of the health service comes to look after him. She decides he has to go to hospital, calls for an ambulance and then begins what becomes a frightening odyssey. The healthcare bureaucracy sends him from hospital to hospital in the middle of the night while his condition worsens all the time. If it had not been for the assistant nurse who remains at his side and accepts all the bullying of doctors and hospital nurses he would have died somewhere on the road.

The film is merciless on the deficiencies of the healthcare system, but it also shows how the courage and human strength of one individual saves the values of community. The film is very long (and this time it matters less), is very well acted and was rightly given a prize at Cannes. It serves as a warning for bureaucratising trends in vital services everywhere!