Vancouver Dispatch. 4.

I've now seen five of the six features commissioned under the banner of Peter Sellars's New Crowned Hope project in honor of Mozart's 250th birthday, and I'm bowled over by their quality.

None of these films concern Mozart directly, and save for a few bars in Tsai Ming-Liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, you won't hear his music, either. Taking their cue from Sellars, the filmmakers celebrate the composer as a prodigious progressive life-force, an artist profoundly engaged with the changing world around him. When I mentioned this series to a certain broadsheet arts editor the other day, he responded dismissively, "It's Sellars hijacking Mozart to his own ends." Which is true, I suppose, but when those ends are all about sponsoring artistic expression across the globe, I'm not sure what the problem is.

Producers Simon Field and Keith Griffiths have cast their net far and wide for this project, backing Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, from Chad; Bahman Ghobadi from Iranian Kurdistan (neither represented in VIFF for logistical reasons); Tsai's film from Malaysia; Garin Nugroho, from Indonesia; Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul, from Thailand; and Paz Encina, from Paraguay.

All the films are worth seeing (the Ghobadi picked up a prize at San Sebastian, so I take that one on trust), but Apichatpong's Syndromes and a Century is a rare pleasure, an experimental feature that is warm and playful, and every bit as strange and mysterious as you would expect from the director of Tropical Malady. Like that film, it is split into halves. The second part functions as a kind of crazy mirror image of the first, featuring some similar but not identical scenes played out in a different, more urban setting. An act of imaginative remembrance dedicated to the filmmaker's mother and father, Syndromes and a Century is resolutely personal and idiosyncratic, but never remotely hermetic - Joe is a filmmaker who keeps opening up new doors that nobody even noticed before.

At first blush, Encina's debut feature, Paraguayan Hammock, looks much more stark and minimalist, comprising long, static shots of a peasant couple in a clearing, and an overdubbed circular conversation about a barking dog, the possibility of rain, and (its true subject) the boy who has gone off to war perhaps never to return.

This thoroughly assured first film doesn't put a foot wrong. The Beckett-like digressions assume more anguish with repetition and every cut counts. I was reminded of what Pedro Costa had said earlier in the week about how shot duration is the big question for filmmakers today. It's the internal music of film structure that reverberates so deeply here, in a movie that finally justifies the epithet "requiem."

That description also applies to Garin Nugroho's Opera Jawa, the only musical in the series, and quite simply the most astonishing film I saw at VIFF. Based on a traditional love story from the Ramayana, and featuring a (sometimes synthed-up) gamelan score, Opera Jawa is a love triangle about a beautiful wife, Siti, her (impotent?) husband, Setio, and a passionate admirer, Ludiro. Nugroho has shifted the context from a royal court to a peasant village, with Ludiro standing in for rapacious businessmen (a workers' uprising is percolating in the background), though in truth his courtship is more akin to amour fou: obsessive, ecstatic and extravagant.

To seduce Siti, he lays a red silk carpet at her doorstep and spreads it out across the fields to guide her to his bed. In another extraordinary sequence, Seito, a potter, literally puts his wife up on a pedestal - or at least, his potter's wheel - and bastes her head to toe in clay.

With its erotic choreography, saturated colours and rhapsodic, surreal folk imagery, the film might be compared to Powell and Pressburger or the kind of musical Paradjanov might have made in these circumstances.

Nugroho is a new filmmaker to me, but VIFF also screened Serambi, a 2005 non-fiction film on which he is credited as supervising director alongside three documentary makers. Beginning with appalling home movie footage of the December '04 tsunami pouring into and over Aceh, the film communicates the terrible aftermath of the disaster through the broken lives of the survivors. It's a heartrending and sometimes inspiring spectacle and, although the films are quite separate, it can't help but deepen our understanding of where Opera Jawa is coming from - just as Jia Zhangke's documentary Dong sheds new light on Still Life.

All these films (with the exception of Paraguayan Hammock) screened in VIFF's Dragons & Tigers section, which has been programmed by Tony Rayns since 1992. Rayns retires this year. There's every hope and expectation that he will be back next year in some capacity (he's staying on as programmer for the much smaller London Film Festival Asian selection) but it won't be the same: he won't be devoting four months of the year to panning for gold throughout East Asia, where he's long since become a regular fixture not only at festivals and film centers but at film schools, too.

A polemical programmer with a yen for originality, transgression and the offbeat, Rayns would make no apology for playing favorites (fans of Johnnie To, Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk had best look elsewhere). If you doubt his taste, look at the careers he championed right from the off: for starters, Kitano Takeshi; Edward Yang and Wong Kar-Wai (one of these days we're going to get to read his "Wong on Wong" book). And before them, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.

Earlier this week in conversation with The Host director Bong Joon-ho, it emerged that Rayns had subtitled Bong's graduation film, a short that he wanted to show at Vancouver. He's shown everything he's done since, too. That story is hardly atypical. He was the first to bring Kore-eda to North American audiences; Lee Chang-Dong; Wisit Sasanatieng; Takashi Miike, and so on and so forth. Gratifyingly, many of the directors he has encouraged and supported have excelled themselves this year: Hong Sang-soo with Woman on the Beach; Tsai Ming-Liang; Bong; Jia Zhangke, and of course Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who also served on the D&T jury this year (awarding the prize to Todo, Todo, Teros, from the Philippines).

There's nothing with the depth and the range of the Dragons & Tigers program anywhere else in the West (it generally shows in the region of 40 features each year). With its large Asian population and multicultural sensibility, Vancouver has proved a fertile ground for this venture. The problem for VIFF director Alan Franey is that Rayns is irreplaceable, an impossible act to follow.

My own fondest memory of this year's festival will surely be the sight of Tony reluctantly cajoled into a spot of early morning karaoke, growling through "House of the Rising Sun" with harmonizing from New Crowned Hope producer Simon Field, VIFF programming consultant Jack Vermee and sundry reprobates. Talk about the music of cinema. It was enough to bring tears to a grown man's eyes.

Posted by dwhudson at October 13, 2006 8:08 AM