Thessaloniki Dispatch.

The buzz at the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival was around the big names, more of them than ever, that it managed to attract this year: John Sayles, John Malkovich, Danny Glover, William Klein, Alfonso Cuaron, Diego Luna, David Strathairn and Chris Cooper, all of whom gave master classes to packed houses. Giving the general public a chance to meet these luminaries and being able to question them is one of the strengths of this invigorating festival.

Updated through 11/27.

As usual, the accompanying exhibitions were an added attraction, one of them being photographs by the 79-year-old William Klein, the American (in Paris) director, photographer, painter and graphic designer. The exhibition could have been called, like the title of a recent book on portrait photography, The Theatre of the Face. There are wonderful faces that Klein has captured from all over the world, always seen affectionately. However, exceptionally, his eye on America is a savage one. They are mostly the faces of The Ugly American.

This was emphasized in his overwhelming feature-length film The Messiah, in which a fine performance of Handel's oratorio is illustrated, counterpoised, interrupted and contradicted by rhythmically cut images of contemporary life, mostly American, in which Las Vegas seems to stand in for Hell. The setting of one of the most sacred of texts by Klein, who announced that he was anti-religious and that Handel is his favorite composer, is almost more topical than it was in 1999 when it was made.

Apart from the guilty pleasure I had in watching as much of the 10-film Mikio Naruse retrospective as I could (guilty because I should have being seeing more Greek films), and realizing how modern his touching and humorous films are, I was able to see several of the movies in the international competition. Though the winner was the excellent Cai Shogun's The Red Awn, which won the Fipresci prize in Pusan a couple of months ago, when I was on the jury, by far the best and most original film, in my opinion, was an Indian film by Shivajee Chandrabhushan called Frozen (site). Shot in the northern Himalayas in superb black-and-white photography, as good as any in the past, it is a remarkably humane film that says much about ecology and politics without the slightest didacticism.

A curiosity was PVC-1 (site) by the 28-year-old Greek-born Spiros Stathoulopoulos. Shot in Colombia in one 85-minute continuous take, it shows the struggle of a woman to free herself from a time-bomb fitted around her neck. Intentional or otherwise, it comes over as a satire on the incompetence of the army and police rather than a thriller.

The best Greek film in competition was Thanos Anastopoulos's correction, which covered various themes such as redemption, immigration, nationalism and racism, in an understated manner. Although these themes, as treated, have a particular Greek significance, the film could be seen in a wider European context. At least it did not aim for an international market like the monumentally bad Greek-Spanish co-production, El Greco. The variety of Greek, Spanish and British actors struggle manfully against unspeakable dialogue in English and a dreadful screenplay, in which the narrator tells you throughout what you can see. It never for a moment suggests what made El Greco a great painter, and an upbeat ending is one that even Hollywood at its most puerile would have turned down. Incidentally, the big-budget movie is a huge box-office success in Greece.

- Ronald Bergan

More from Thessaloniki: Ray Pride on the Circuit.

Update, 11/27: Ray Pride's got more photos: parts 2, 3 and 4.

Posted by dwhudson at November 26, 2007 7:02 AM