Thessaloniki. Wrap-up.

Back in the comfort of home, I can now write about my last hours of viewing at Thessaloniki and give details of the awards. Particularly, on the last day I caught some more films from the festival's Balkan Survey, this year celebrating its 10th anniversary.

But the best Balkan film this year was, understandably, in the international competition section. Pjer Zalica's Days and Hours (2004) underlines the strength of Bosnian film as outlined in my Dispatch No. 7. Here, Zalica takes the small talk of everyday Bosnians - mundane discussions about broken boilers, computer classes and leather slippers - and shows how the war has left its scars. There are no shots of shelled-out buildings here, and the trauma is almost entirely offscreen and understated. But nevertheless it is present, and the chit-chat of the film's protagonists, which would be boring if not realized with so much observational care, reveals the extent to which war becomes something that effects not just extraordinary circumstances (grand heroics, spectacularly tragic stories, extremes of human endurance, etc) but also the quotidian chores of all those who live through it and after it. This is a quiet film, but also an innovative one that depicts a people who have suffered beyond human comprehension but who have still chosen, as depicted in the almost fairy tale ending, to embrace life.

Sadly, though, I missed Victor Erice's short film "The Challenges" (1968), particularly regrettable as I'd managed to catch everything else in the retrospective of this important director who is beloved by cineastes but almost unknown to the general public.

His Spirit of the Beehive (1973) has appeared on lists of the greatest films ever made (including that by veteran critic Derek Malcolm) and his Dream of Light: The Quince Tree Sun (1992) was voted the most influential film of the 1990s in a poll of over 60 international programmers. The strength of these works is not just their formal innovation (in fact, they seem remarkably unshowy and create an illusion that directing a film must be a very easy task) but that they fire a remarkable affinity for the process of imagination and creation in the viewer and that they are, in fact, the culmination of years of work condensed into a few films that have become milestones - since he started his filmmaking career in the 1960s, he has only completed three features, although another is reportedly in preparation. With a painterly interest in composition (Dream of Light is about the work of a Spanish artist, Antonio Lopez) and a film language that is both poetic and clear, Erice deserves to be more well known (for example, a few DVD releases would be nice).

Erice's Dream of Light is often compared to Abbas Kiarostami, the subject of his own retrospective at this year's Thessaloniki festival (perhaps it was a coincidence, perhaps not). Kiarostami has had a close relationship with the festival since the first year it went international (from being a showcase of Greek films) in 1992, when he was invited as a virtual unknown on the festival circuit. He's been back several times since, and, for example, I was able to see his first venture into digital filmmaking, Ten (2002) with Kiarostami in attendance at Thessaloniki in 2002. This time, I only got to see his Under the Olive Trees (1994), which amply exhibits a number of his favorite themes: making films about filmmaking, car journeys and gender relations in contemporary Iran.

Although there were many films here that I hadn't seen before, I was particularly disappointed that I never found time to head out to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art where there is an exhibition of his still photography (traveling on from Turin). The reproductions I have seen have look stunning, expressing not just a wonderful sense of landscape and light but also a profoundly spiritual exploration of the Iranian countryside.

But what of the winners of the festival?

If the Kiaorostami retrospective was not enough to confirm the reputation of Iranian cinema, Bitter Dream (Iran, 2004) by Mohsen Amiryousefi came away with the first prize, the Golden Alexander, and the Public Choice Award. I only saw two of the competition films, but of those I did see, I was pleased to learn that by Marina Razbezhkina's Harvest Time managed to pick up a shared Silver Alexander, with Alejo Taube's One or the Other (Argentina, 2004). Harvest Time also managed to bag the Artistic Achievement Award. FIPRESCI, often seen as the artistic antidote of the capricious whims of festival-installed juries, gave their prize to The Green Hat (China, 2004) by Liu Fendou.

Greek films should not go without a mention either. The festival showcases the entire year's production from the country and they have their own prizes (although two Greek films were also entered in the international competition). The most prestigious of these prizes, the FIPRESCI award for a Greek film, went to Nikos Panayotopoulos's Delivery (2004), which also played at the Venice Film Festival earlier in the year (but was, reportedly, jeered by the audience).

Theo Angelopoulos's Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004) wasn't up for any prizes. I didn't get to see the film, but the buzz about it was very negative, with one of my colleagues in the international press only half-jokingly suggesting to me that the best way to view it was on fast forward in the video room so the action would appear at normal speed. However, the good news for Angelopolous fans is that the director has finally agreed that his early works can be released on DVD; he'd been holding out for ages on the basis that the only way to view his films was on the big screen. British releases are definitely in the pipeline. Surely the US can't be far behind?

I didn't attend the festival in 2003, but it was reportedly even better than this year's. Still, despite the occasional dull film, the selection for the 2004 edition has been superb, and admitting last year's was better is no sign of disrespect to the strong showing at this year's festival (which was hampered by a lower budget as a result of Greece's grand Olympic binge).

With its intimate atmosphere (helped by a compact festival venue, as opposed to being scattered all over a city's cinemas), Thessaloniki is a winning combination of good films and the ability to meet and talk to their makers. A little over a decade ago, this was just a small national film festival, yet it has been transformed in a matter of years to an event that commands international respect in a highly competitive field. It's not Cannes. It's not Berlin. It's not Venice. But it's a unique opportunity to watch the best of world cinema in a relaxed and informal environment. All of this can be credited to director Michel Demopoulos, who was the architect of the festival's transformation from parochial sideshow to small but important international crossroads in the film world.

So why would anyone want to change the winning formula? Answer: politics. A new right-wing government has just taken power in Greece and there is a serious chance that the festival's magical mix of international artistry and intimacy may be tampered with: either making the selection more Greek or more show-bizzy, either of which would probably involve deposing the popular Demopoulos and installing a new festival administration (shades of what happened to the Venice film festival when Silvio Berlusconi's right-leaning government took power in Italy). Absolutely everyone I spoke to at the festival, Greek and non-Greek, seemed to think this would be a disaster. Thessaloniki obviously can't compete with the red-carpet events of the film world (it can't attract the big-name stars to make it work and the soft-spoken auteurs who love it would disappear) and a more Greek-orientated festival could well lead to an exodus of carefully earned international attention. Representatives from magazines such as Variety, Sight and Sound, Cineaste, Film Comment, Positif and Time Out and newspapers such as the Guardian, L’Humanité and Liberation were at this year's festival - how many of them would come to an event focused exclusively or almost exclusively on Greek cinema?

At the end of the festival, a petition was circulating in protest of the removal of Eduardo Antin from his job as director of the Buenos Aires Film Festival, despite his internationally recognized success at raising the profile of Argentinean cinema (which had a profile at Thessaloniki this year). Let's hope there'lll be no need in the near future of such devices to support Demopoulos and the work he has done.

Posted by dwhudson at November 29, 2004 6:17 AM