9th International Film Festival Bratislava
November 30 – December 07, 2007

Festival report

The Ecumenical Jury of SIGNIS and INTERFILM comprising,
Daniela Frumusani-Roventa (Romania), Jean-Michel Zucker (France)
and Tomas Straka (Slovak Republique)

awards its prize to the long feature film in competition

Jellyfish / Meduzot
by Etgar Keret, Shira Geffen, Israel/France 2007

For the poetic and symbolic reconciliation with others  and themselves of individuals facing existential torments .

The Ecumenical Jury awards a Commendation to the films

Garage / Garage
by Lenny Abrahamson, Ireland 2007

Garage emphasises in a minimalist style the behaviour of a simple guy who offers and searches foe compassion, giving us a great lesson of human dignity.

and

Blind Mountain / Mang shan
by Li Yang, Hong Kong/Germany 2007

Blind Mountain presents the tragic history of a Chinese young girl sold and imprisoned, who with the only aid of a little boy tries to break the indifference and ignorance of a rural community.

 
THOUGHTS AND SYMBOLS
BRATISLAVA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2007
Report by Daniela Roventa-Frumusani, University of Bucharest,
Member of the Ecumenical Jury

If «stars, glamour and great cinema are the traditional trademarks of the Berlin International Film Festival» (as says Klaus Wowereit, Governing Mayor of Berlin), creativity, youth and genuine multicultural perspective could be the trademarks of the Bratislava International Film Festival, arrived in December 2007 at its 9th edition. Focused on first and second feature films, the Bratislava International Film Festival, 30 November-8 December 2007, has gathered representative personalities for all its juries.

In a world in turmoil, tormented by wars, crises, ecological disasters, art and religion are meant to promote balance, peace, tolerance and dignity. In this spirit worked all juries when delivering the awards. I will quote Jan Harlen remembering us the insightful sentences of the wedding ceremony: “With my body I honour you, what I am  I give to you, what I have I share with you”. Put in other words but keeping the spirit, we shared in the etymological sense of communication “communis” the values of tolerance, dignity, reconciliation, values the filmmakers tried to and in most cases achieved to evoke and provoke.

Beyond this common ethical connotation, all the feature films as life in general tried to discover "the schemes" (stereotypes, common places) and to fight against them, in order to build autonomy, coherent identities and freedom through individual and social change. As Michel Foucault has said once: "Perhaps the aim of thinking is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are".

Out of 16 feature films in competition, the most salient productions (awarded or not by the juries) were preoccupied by the power/hegemony relationship, in my opinion (maybe a gendered one) by the absence (death?!) of the father:
- instead of the respectful authority of pater familias a narcissistic morally criminal father like in the Danish film “The Art of Crying”;
- instead of a beloved husband and potential father the cruel master who buys, beats and morally kills and pushes to crime his slave-wife like in the Chinese movie “Blind Mountain”, a powerful metaphor for the loneliness in a world where people and nature are blind at women's tragedy;
- a strictly speaking absent father, brought back by an inventive little son accompanied in his attempts by the elder adolescent sister like in the Polish film “Tricks”;
- a physically present but spiritually absent father like in the Argentinian film “XXY”, about the hermaphrodite young girl Alexandra;
- or, last but not least, “Karoy” a very surprising modern fairy tale written by a young woman filmmaker from Kazakhstan which presents a mixtum compositum of good and evil in the main character Azat - emblem of male violence (unbearable scenes of rape with a pregnant poor mother) but also of male love (the same Azat becoming the best son, brother and uncle in a Deus ex machina total transformation, unfortunately without any psychological reason).

The same connotation of lack of men's responsibility on one hand and cruelty on the other hand marks some movies of the section "Made in Europe" screened in parallel with the competition:
- “4 months,3 weeks and 2 days” of the Romanian young director Cristian Mungiu, the Palme d'Or winner at the 60th Cannes festival 2007;
- “Eastern Promises”, directed by David Cronenberg and representing the Russian mafia in London in an unbearable violent and hopeless movie awarded at the Toronto 2007 Festival;
- “Magnus” directed by a young Estonian woman writer who tells us that "all of us are children and some of us are parents". Magnus (the young boy obsessed by illness and death, trying twice to commit suicide) as well as his father are "controversial just life is. The film looks at just how much love is left in our hedonistic and selfish times" (Kadri Koussar, director of the film).

Trying to keep in mind the main message of the films in competition I associated intertextually famous literary or poetic  titles to some of the films. For me the sober, classic irish film “Garage” will remain as "Splendeurs et misères du quotidien" like the famous title of Balzac. The Chinese film on women's ancient and modern slavery correlated to men's solidarity will be "No Way Out" or "The Conspiration of Silence". The Danish film “The Art of Crying” another “Secrets and lies”, the Estonian film “Sugisball” as "Closed Horizons", while Jane Birkin's film “Boxes” as “La femme à 40 ans”.
The expressive “Control” would remain as a fundamental existential question "Do we have any control over our lives?", while the Hungarian “Happy New Life” was a modern drama on loneliness "No Roots, no Hope", and one of the best films awarded by the public - the Romanian “California Dreaming” as "From nowhere to elsewhere", the poetic “Jellyfish” as "The apparently impossible reconciliation" and the genuine “Tricks” as "Happiness right here, around the corne"».

The general spirit of the festival in its first feature films as well as in the classical ones (like those of Lynch, Cronenberg etc.) has been a profound reflection on human condition in the contemporary world, with more questions than answers, more problems than solutions  in a significant horizon of myths and symbols.