Thessaloniki Dispatch. 3.

Another rewarding day, spent shuttling back and forth between the festival's locations - the historic port complex with its old red-brick warehouse converted into modern cinemas and the Olympion theater five minutes away in the waterfront Aristotle Square, reputedly the prettiest square in the Balkans.

Today's catch included two films from the New Russian Cinema series, although only one of them, Dmitri Meskhiev's Svoi (2004), is worth discussing, and Goran Paskaljevic's Midwinter Night's Dream (Serbia, 2004), part of the Contemporary Masters section of the festival. Although from different countries and having completely different themes and styles, both features are about coming to terms with past.

Goran Paskaljevic was already internationally famous for his allegorical films with a political edge when he made, in 1998, the explosive anti-war drama Bure baruta (literally "The Powder Keg," but called Cabaret Balkan in the US for legal reasons), depicting a group of inter-connected Belgraders caught up in a meaningless cycle of violence. With his latest film, Midwinter Night's Dream, he follows up on Bure baruta's legacy by examining Serbia's attempts to come to terms with its recent history. Lazar (Lazar Ristovski) returns from a ten-year spell in prison for murder to find his mother's house occupied by Bosnian refugees and her possessions stolen by the neighbors. He tries to kick out the intruders, single mum Jasna and her autistic twelve-year-old daughter Jovana, but on seeing conditions in the refugee camp for Bosnians, he allows them to stay with him - falling in love with Jasna and building a deep affection for Jovana. Containing documentary elements, Midwinter Night's Dream is a study of Serbia's own autism and a horrible confession of its complicity in war crimes.

The film has already had a good start on the festival circuit, winning a special jury prize at San Sebastian, and is likely to be popular elsewhere for its intellectual and moral honesty. But I felt the film was marred by the clash between the gritty realism of its MiniDV photography and its clearly allegorical intentions. The real test of its strength as a film, though, will be how the film fares in Serbia. It has its domestic premiere in Belgrade tomorrow.

Can other countries rise to the challenge and admit their part in the horrors of the Balkan wars of the 1990s? Maybe. Later in the festival, I hope to report on a Croatian feature that has the opportunity to do just that.

Russia's huge sacrifice in the Second World War - a staggering twenty million dead - has had a correspondingly large influence on the development of the cinema of the country. Early films about the war against Hitler eulogized the personal courage of ordinary Russians (who were all good) against the Germans (who were all bad). Great advances were made in the late 1950s with the introduction of a more realist tone to this simplistic schema and, since the 1970s, filmmakers have tried to paint a more complicated picture. Larisa Shepitko's transcendental The Ascent (1976), for example, was the first film to show that Russians in occupied territory had collaborated with the Germans - a huge taboo in Soviet cinema.

Svoi seeks to muddy these moral waters further and aims to show that Russians who collaborated may have been decent people and may even have been patriots (although, obviously, many were not). This is even evident in the title, Svoi, which has been translated by the producers as "We Ourselves," making it sound staunchly isolationist (as in "without anyone else's help"), when, in fact, the word is more inclusive and embracing - one's own, one's nearest and dearest, one's country.

Also unlike the traditional Russian war film, Svoi revels in Peckinpah-like/Spielbergian effects - graphic shots of the bloody violence underlined by devices such as bullets shattering windows and jugs of milk in slow motion. But despite such stylization in its limited number of set pieces and its programmatic nature, Svoi strives to be realist in tone. The cultural specificities of the plot may be lost on most Western viewers, but it is testament to the dramatic power of this intelligent and tense work that it can overcome this and can easily be appreciated by anyone from any cultural background.

The next step for Russian cinema, presumably, is a film that sympathizes with German soldiers.

Also worthy of mention is a brief excursion out of my chosen patch into Argentinean cinema, with a viewing of Lisandro Alonso's second feature The Dead (2004), a beautiful and elegiac account of a serial killer's voyage into the jungle to visit his daughter. Viewing this, it is easy to see why the country is currently experiencing a wave of international interest (just three years ago, Thessaloniki had a sidebar devoted to Argentinean film).

Posted by dwhudson at November 23, 2004 6:59 AM