Goran Paskaljevic and Milco Mancevski

A special section called “Europe Outside Europe” represents the competition program at FEST.  This section is composed of films from European countries that have not yet been included in the European Union, which in essence makes it a de facto Balkan panorama.  Well-known directors in this year’s section included Milco Mancevski and Danis Tanovic.  The jury presiding over the competition section included the Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic, Cineaste editor Deborah Young, German film critic and curator Barbara Lorey de Lacharriere, and Serbian film critic Dubravka Lakic.

In the end Mancevski walked away with the grand prize (a replica of the sculpture “Erythrocyte” by Serbian artist Nikola Pesic) for his film film Mothers.   Mothers was the best of the competition films that I saw (granted I did not get a chance to watch Tanovic’s Circus Columbia).  It was more experimental in form than Dmitri Mamulia’s Another Sky and more emotional than Mladen Maticevic’s Together.  It is comforting to see that Mancevski is still pushing the boundaries of his art form rather than succumbing to mainstream demands, as can often happen when your feature film debut is awarded the Golden Lion in Venice.  During a post-screening interview Mancevski revealed that despite offers, he is not attuned to working in Hollywood on big budget pictures because he is not willing to sacrifice his freedom of creative expression.  Hopefully his fifth film will continue to blaze new paths in Macedonian cinema and serve as a model for future generations of creatively-inclined Macedonian auteurs.

R

The film R by first-time writing/directing team Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer is a work of gritty realism that gives an example of how to transcend genre by adhering to it faithfully.  R follows the generic tradition of the prison film, which demands certain tropes: the new guy learning the ropes, the hierarchical struggle, the rise through the ranks, dispatching of a snitch, the downfall.  This Danish film owes a debt to American Me and Blood In, Blood Out, among others.  However, though it works with and through shared conventions it does not succumb to a romantic Hollywood-ization of incarceration.

Ostensibly the protagonist of the film is Rune (Pilou Asbaek), the new guy in question and (also ostensibly) namesake of the movie.  He arrives in prison on a two-year stint for stabbing a man which of course immediately runs him afoul of inmates who were friends to his victim.  They take advantage of Rune in numerous ways until he makes himself useful in the drug trade and slowly moves up the ladder of respectability.  Eventually things go wrong and Rune must pay for a botched deal with his life.  This occurs about three-quarters of the way through the film.

Michel Ciment

On a Saturday morning the veteran French film critic Michel Ciment hosted a master class in which he discussed his personal history as a critic as well as the larger history of film criticism and cinema in general.  As a young man Ciment loved to read film criticism of all types and often kept a notebook listing the films he had seen with short observations regarding how he felt about them.  He began publishing his first film reviews for a small student magazine and then decided to send a long review of Orson Welles’ The Trial to the venerable film journal Positif.

Ciment recalled that many critics at that time attacked Welles’ film, believing it to be a betrayal of Kafka’s writing among other offenses.  He instead wrote an extended defense of the film which was accepted and published by Positif launching his career as a professional critic in the process.  During the late 50s and early 60s Positif and Cahiers du Cinema were often at odds with each other, championing different filmmakers as well as different causes.  Positif was known as a left-oriented magazine (how Ciment also identified himself) while Cahiers du Cinema leaned to the right.  Of course these two French journals were not only on the front lines of the battle for cinema in the 50s and 60s but they also became the flagship enterprises and symbols of advanced film criticism throughout the world.

Hitler in Hollywood

A fictional documentary by Frederic Sojcher in the tradition of the great mockumentaries.  Starring Maria de Medeiros (of Pulp Fiction fame) as herself, hot on the trail of a missing filmmaker of the classical era who was wrapped up in a CIA-sponsored plot to use Hollywood to destroy the financial prospects of European cinema in the postwar period.  So the film betrays maybe just a bit of an irrational fear of Hollywood hegemony which nevertheless is based on a meritorious complaint about a general lack of diversity in movie theaters all over the world.

The film is shot in a first-person manner from the point-of-view of either de Medeiros or her cameraman (and would-be lover).  Visually the film looks excellent and is given a majestic air because of the use of large-gauge film stock rather than the expected digital video for an aesthetic of this kind.