Saturday, February 02, 2008
Festival Wars
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During my four decades on the festival circuit, I have seldom met a fest director who couldn’t resist the temptation to slap his dates atop the schedule of a rival whenever that festival is rumored to be holding better program playing cards.
The examples are legion: Cannes vs Venice in the 1950s. Berlin vs Cannes in the 1980s. Rotterdam vs Berlin in the 1990s. Moscow vs St. Petersburg. Sochi vs Moscow and St. Petersburg. Year by year, over and over again. Festival spats multiplied to the highest power.
Even bitter quarrels inside festivals count as “friendly head-butting” wars: Cannes Competition vs Directors Fortnight, beginning in 1970. Berlinale Competition vs International Forum of New Cinema, beginning in 1971. Soviet Goskino vs Dom Kino Directors, beginning in 1975.
Some festival wars made history. Others were opera buffa. All, however, were welcome copy for the journalist gristmill.
For instance....
Back in the days of the Cold War, when Europe was split down the middle between East and West, festival one-upmanship between the two diametrically opposed systems was common practice. One rather infamous case occurred in July of 1972: click on Karlovy Vary versus Pula for the whole story.
For three decades, from 1959 to 1989, the biannual Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) ruled supreme as the kingpin of all Soviet film events. It was the official festival showcase of power and policy at Goskino, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography. In 1983, a revolution was brewing – with good reason. The Union of Soviet Filmmakers was fedup with Goskino’s tricky „package deals“ on the international festival circuit. Click on Goskino versus Union of Soviet Filmmakers for that story.
Triggered by earthquake decisions made by the charismatic Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, an astonishing chain of political and cultural events inundated the Soviet Union and Socialist Europe like a dam-breaking flood. Overnight, film festivals in the Soviet Union multiplied like split atoms. Upstart versus the birthplace of Russian cinema: click on Moscow versus St. Petersburg for a walk through the intrigue.
One evening, while attending the 2004 St.Petersburg festivals, my wife and I were deep in conversation with the city cultural minister, I was tapped on the shoulder by a translator friend to meet another American guest just in from the Moscow film festival: Meryl Streep.
I mentioned that I knew a friend of hers, who had once directed her in a stage production of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment at the Yale Repertory Theatre. And how much Polish stage-and-screen master Andrzej Wajda liked working with her and Christopher Lloyd on that production.
From there, the conversation shifted to Robert Brustein and Alexander Sokurov and Vera Kholodnaya. She had recently seen Sokurov’s one-shot Russian Ark (2003), which she called „a visual treat.“ Since I had contributed to a documentary about the making of that film, Knut Elstermann’s In One Breath: Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2003), we were now on safe conversational ground.
And since Meryl Streep had also seen Nikita Mikhalkov’s Slave in Love (1976), a camouflaged ode to pre-Revolution silent cinema, I could pull Vasily, my longtime interpreter friend, into the conversation.
The story of Vera Kholodnaya (1893-1918), the great Russian silent screen star, is touched upon only superficially in Mikhalkov’s Slave of Love, for in the mid-1970s “Tsarist cinema” was still a matter only for the book shelves.
“We’re just now beginning to appreciate her great talent,” said Vasily. “And others in that splendid pre-Revolution silent era.”
Festival wars can spawn memorable get-togethers.
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Monday, January 28, 2008
Highlights at 2007 Eurasia Almaty
From the 4th Eurasia International Film Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Almaty is a boom town.
Buoyed by extensive oil and gas reserves and stabilized by agricultural products and grain exports, the Almaty well-to-do are anything but reluctant to celebrate the good life. During the week-long Eurasia festival, a trio of massive festive banquets were held to honor VIP guests and government officials flown in from the Astana capital.
The French delegation was particularly prominent, led by Gérard Depardieu and Sophie Marceau. Film directors, producers and actors from neighboring Central Asian countries were also highly visible.
Screenings were held in the multiplex at the mammoth Silk Way City mall, the Caesar theatre chain scattered across the city, the Palace of the Republic, and Dom Kino (the House of Cinema headquarters of Kazakh directors). The 150-page catalogue in three languages (Kazakh, Russian, English) also spotlighted the support given by more than 50 sponsors, the most prominent of which was the festival’s General Sponsor, the Atameken Holding Joint Stock Company.
Artistic Director Gulnara Abikeyeva assembled a solid program of 15 entries for the international Competition of Asian and European Films, with purses for winners totalling around $50,000. Another 12 entries competed for laurels in the Competition of Central Asian and Turkic Films.
Directorial retrospectives honored Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-Lang, Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos, Kazakhstan’s Mazhit Begalin, and Kazakh Animation (celebrating its 40th anniversary). These were in addition to an Out-of-Competition sidebar featuring highlights from recent international film festivals.
Of particular importance to visiting critics was a well-attended roundtable on the current status of Central Asian cinema conducted by Gulnara Abikeyeva. Here, productions in neighboring Central Asian countries were discussed at some length, with European visitors taking notice of new Central Asian film festivals that bode well for the future: Critic Gulbara Tolomushova heads the progressive Biskek film festival in Kyrgystan, a short four-hour driving distance from Almaty. And filmmaker Safar Hadkodov programs the equally vital Dushambe film festival in Tajikistan.
Kazakh entries were standouts at this year’s Eurasia film festival.
In the International Competition, the Special Jury Prize was awarded to Darezhan Omirbaev’s Shuga, a free-flowing adaptation of motifs in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to a contemporary Kazakh milieu. Often cited as the “Robert Bresson of Central Asian Cinema,” Darezhan Omirbaev’s minimalist style has guaranteed him continual French co-production support over the years. Ainur Turganbaeva gives a remarkable performance as the tragic heroine Shuga, a married woman from Astana who falls fatally for a young suitor while trying to reconcile her brother’s marriage problems in Almaty.
The Grand Prize in the Central Asian and Turkic Competition was awarded to Abai Kulbai’s Strizh (Swift), a portrait of a young girl who struggles with forces beyond her control — a drunken stepfather, a pregnant mother, drugs and violence at school — to find her place in an ice-cold, impersonal and uncaring Almaty. When Abai Kulbai accepted his prize in the Palace of the Republic, he requested that his mentor in a director’s workshop at the Almaty Academy of Arts — Ardak Amirkulov, one of the key figures in the Kazakh New Wave of yesteryear — join him onstage for the honor.
Bahman Ghobadi’s Niwemung (Half Moon) was deservedly awarded the Grand Prize for Best Film in the International Competition. Given the portfolio of the festival, Half Moon is Eurasian to the core — an Iranian-French-Austrian-Iraqi roadmovie co-production. When Mamo, an old and venerated Kurdish musician living in Iran, announces to his ten sons that he wants to give one final concert in his native Kurdistan quarter of Iraq, they immediately join the stubborn old man on his journey in a dilapidated bus — even though they suspect that his visa papers are hardly in order.
Along the way, the musicians stop to pick up a female singer in an isolated village, a decision that can only lead to more trouble — for Iranian women are not allowed to sing in public before an audience with men. Add to these dilemmas a premonition of death (the half-moon in the old man’s dreams), and you have a spellbinding Iranian-Iraqi border movie you will not easily forget.
For that matter, once you visit Almaty, you won’t forget that boom town either!
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Sunday, January 27, 2008
Eurasia Almaty 2007 Remembers the “Kazakh New Wave”
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From the 4th Eurasia International Film Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan
Eurasia Almaty 2007 closed on another high note at the Palace of the Republic, this time prompted by a VIP address by Adilbek Zhaksybekov (sometimes spelled Dzhaksybekov), head of the Presidential Administration under Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
“From now on,” Zhaksybekov announced, “the Eurasia Film Festival would be held annually” — instead of biannually as it had been since its founding in 1998. And he added: “We believe in a great future for the Eurasia film festival and wish our Kazakh cinematography to develop as rapidly as our political and economical stability.”
One has to take the presidential administrator at his word, for among the political hats worn by Adilbek Zhaksybekov over the past few years are: Mayor of Astana (2002), Board Chairman of the Islamic Development Bank (2003), Minister of Industry and Trade (2004), Chairman of Information and Communications Agency (2004), and (in August of 2007) President of the Soccer Federation of Kazakhstan.
Most important of all for the struggling Kazakh film industry, Zhaksybekov (born in 1954) studied film economics at the All-Union State Cinematography School (VGIK) in Moscow and began his career in the 1980s in the State Cinematography Office of the Soviet Kazakh Republic in Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata).
It was during this time that the “Kazakh New Wave” burst like a comet upon the international festival scene.
In 1984, while Sergei Solovyov, a Moscow-based Russian director, was shooting The Wild Pigeon in Kazakhstan, he invited young Kazakhs from his film crew to attend his Master Class at the Moscow Film School (VGIK).
Among these youngsters was Rashid Nugmanov, whose first feature film, The Needle (1988), was seen by an estimated 25 million across the Soviet Union — an incredible box office hit by any standard.
Independently produced at the Kazakhfilm Studio, this avant-garde, action-gangster, rock-and-drugs feature starred underground pop star Victor Tsoi, with music on the soundtrack played by his band.
Shortly thereafter, at the 1989 Moscow film festival, other films by Kazakh directors were screened, the “Kazakh New Wave” was coined by visiting critics, and invitations from abroad immediately followed.
In 1990, Rashid Nugmanov, the newly elected First Secretary of the Union of Kazakh Filmmakers, attended the Sundance festival. Shortly thereafter, just as Kazakhstan was declaring its national independence in 1991, a Kazakh film retrospective was programmed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Unfortunately, the Kazakh New Wave lasted a short ten years, from 1984 to 1994. During this time, however, international audiences became well acquainted with the diverse talents of the directors in the movement.
Darezhan Omirbaev, critic-editor for the Almaty-based New Film journal, was recognized as a genuine auteur after the international success of his minimalist short, July (1988). His first feature film, Kairat (1991), the story of a young man from a village who faces loneliness and despair in Almaty, was awarded the Silver Leopard at the 1992 Locarno festival.
Abai Karpikov also portrayed the pessimism of Kazakh youth in Little Fish in Love (1989).
Serik Aprimov took the pulse of the decaying Soviet empire in The Last Stop (1989).
Amir Karakulov’s A Woman Between Two Brothers (1991) won critical praise as a sophisticated psycho-drama.
And Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Atrar (1991) broke new ground as the first genuine Kazakh historical epic.
National independence, however, brought with it increasing government interference at the Kazakhfilm Studio. Rashid Nugmanov just managed to finish The Wild East (1993) before emigrating to France.
A year later, in the summer of 1994, only one film was in production at Kazakhfilm, while three projects at the studio had been halted midway through production. Still, the mystique of the Kazakh New Wave has lived on in the work of directors who found co-production support abroad in France and other western European countries.
The Almaty now is for my next entry.
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Saturday, January 26, 2008
The Saga of Chengiz Aytmatov
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From the 4th Eurasia International Film Festival in Almaty, Kazakhstan
When Chengiz Aytmatov went onstage in the spacious Palace of the Republic in Almaty at the closing gala of the 4th Eurasia International Film Festival (23-29 September 2007) to receive an honorary award from the Kazakh government, he was greeted with a standing ovation. And, indeed, the applause was well deserved.
For the 78-year-old Kyrgys writer-diplomat is revered throughout Central Asia not only as a gifted storyteller whose heartrending novella Jamila (published in 1958) was praised by Louis Aragon as “the world’s most beautiful love story,” but also as the first Kyrgys Ambassador to Luxembourg and the European Union in Brussels.
Moreover, during the high-water mark of the Khrushchev “thaw” (1956-65), when Chengiz Aytmatov was appointed head of the Kyrgyzfilm Studio in Frunze (today Biskek), he fostered there a path-breaking “director’s cinema” that helped revolutionize Soviet cinematography altogether.
How Chengiz Aytmatov accomplished this rather extraordinary feat still boggles the imagination today. But for the newly appointed studio head, it simply meant sustaining a fading nomadic culture while fostering a native film tradition.
The story goes like this.
Upon receiving the 1963 Lenin Prize for Literature for his Tales of the Mountains and the Steppes, and backed by a film studio ready and willing to do his bidding, Chengiz Aytmatov had invited a talented 22-year-old student from the Moscow Film School (VGIK) to direct the studio’s first film production.
Larisa Shepitko had sent him a script based on his own “Camel’s Ear” story in the Tales of the Mountains and the Steppes collection. Aytmatov liked it and invited her to shoot the film on actual locations in Kyrgyzstan. Upon completion, her Heat (1963) s | | |