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ARTISTIC DIRECTOR'S WELCOME
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A
message from the Artistic Director Anne Démy-Geroe
This has
been an extraordinary year for commercial exhibition.
The Day After Tomorrow, The Passion of the
Christ, Elephant, and Super Size Me
have jostled for attention in a spectrum as broad
as any in cinema's history, raising the perennial
question: what is the role of a film festival?
I can really only answer by reflecting on the
programme.
Side by side with digital pictures,
which reduce live performance to a residual element
stitching together special effects-driven spectacle,
are films like our opener, The
Life and Death of Peter Sellers, which
places live performance back at the centre of
the viewing experience.
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I'm sure everyone is waiting to see
how successfully Geoffrey Rush assumes the great mimic's
elusive persona. The answer is that his out-standing
titular performance makes this a perfect year to recall
Rush's Brisbane origins by honouring him with the Chauvel
Award for distinguished contribution to Australian feature
filmmaking.
As I overview
the programme, reducing it to themes has been impossible.
But the notion of a spectrum perhaps fits. Colours spreading,
merging, contrasting—non-fiction into fiction, personal
into collective vision, local into universal, past into
present—the Festival becomes a kaleidoscope of images
that we try to fit into boxes while cinema can be viewed
as an opportunity to either escape or examine the world.
Are these false distinctions? A Festival's role is to
both challenge and entertain—with no value judgements
attached to either notion. The programme offers rewarding
scope for both.
Escaping. Within
the context of a festival, this means an opportunity
to escape the everyday while still indulging in stimulating
and thought-provoking viewing. There are many among
the 201 films.
There's the
unexpected that every festival must deliver—‘firsts'
with a Fijian indigenous film, The
Land Has Eyes, and the long-awaited Before
Sunset, the first-ever indie sequel. And the
expected—a sophisticated relationship drama from France:
Patrice Leconte's elegant Intimate
Strangers with its nod to Hitchcock.
European cinema
continues to resist the pitfalls of the Euro-pudding,
while looking at its multicultural reality with works
such as
Distant, Head-On,
and Donau,
Duna, Dunaj, Dunav, Dunarea—all charting complex
personal relationships. Films from Asia go from strength
to strength on the festival circuit with the likes of
A
Good Lawyer's Wife (South Korea), Darkness
Bride (Hong Kong), Uniform
(China), and Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye
Dragon Inn.
On my spectrum,
the past is contrived to intersect with the present
in a broad range of retrospectives. There's undeniably
a fantasy element lurking this year. The works of visionary
French poet, artist, and filmmaker, Jean Cocteau—Beauty
and the Beast, the Orpheus
trilogy, and The
Eagle Has Two Heads—also flirt with the Surreal.
At the other end of personal cinema's spectrum, James
Benning bypasses commercial imperatives altogether
through the implacable gaze of his 16mm Bolex. If Cocteau
demonstrated that commercial cinema could accommodate
an avant-gardist's personal vision, the Czech
Gothic season reminds us that cinema is mostly a
collective enterprise. The fantasies of Czech cinema,
spread over three decades rarely free of the heavy hand
of authority, invite us to suspend disbelief through
a complex mix of culture, politics, and personal vision.
The rediscovery
of almost forgotten work reminds us that cinema's past
does not sit waiting to be revisited at whim thanks
to DVD. This is demonstrated by the recent rediscovery
of the work of Ozu contemporary, Shimizu Hiroshi. Brisbane
audiences have the opportunity to share the sense of
revelation that attended the first screenings outside
Japan of unseen works by Ozu and Kurosawa in the 1950s.
Rediscovery can take another form.
ScreenSound Australia has striven through several restorations
to bring Australian silent cinema's major surviving
masterpiece, The
Sentimental Bloke, to contemporary audiences
in its full, tinted glory. This is the year for the
unveiling of the definitive version, accompanied live
by the Jen Anderson Trio. Pure, wonderful escapism.
Escape of the more cerebral sort?
This is the century year of Ulysses, a work that has
so far eluded successful adaptation. Joyce's contemporary,
Marcel Proust, has also offered a challenge to filmmakers.
Interestingly, the most successful adaptations to date
come from acknowledged masters of French avant-garde
cinema. These two relatively recent films stand in sharp
contrast to earlier attempts and each other. One of
the most accessible films of exiled Chilean director,
Ruiz, Time
Regained, is a period piece, impressionistic
in nature. Akerman, brought up on Proust, sets La Captive
in the present.
What initially
looks like escapism can often mask something else. The
two Studio Ghibli animes are of this nature. Beneath
the sugar-coating of these irresistible films lie some
serious messages.
Examining.
Looking at our world in other or deeper ways. BIFF's
strongest yet line-up of documentaries is diverse and
impassioned. The Corporation probes the chequered history
of multinational giants; S21:
The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine is appalling
in its quietness about genocide, survival, and responsibility.
My Flesh and Blood is an the uplifting
story on the personal level about compassion and mutual
needs. From opposite ends of the globe—The
Story of the Weeping Camell, bound to be an
audience favourite, and
Ässhäk, Tales from the Sahara from Ulrike
Koch, whose The Saltmen of Tibet was an audience
favourite at BIFF 1998. The beautifully shot This
Ain't No Heartland
horrifies us at the political ignorance; War
at a Distance gives a timely reminder of the
complete severance of target/victim from perpetrator
in war. Silent
Waters
examines the Muslim/Sikh conflict in the Punjab;
Panahi's new film Crimson
Gold is both particular and universal.
An important strand is the Argentinian
spotlight. At its core are two powerful documentaries:
one about radical filmmaker Raymundo Gleyzer,
the other by the equally radical Pino Solanas, given
an honorary Golden Bear at this year's Berlinalé.
Talking Australian—the
début features, Somersault,
and Tom
White, featuring such a strong performance
from Colin Friels, to the surprising The
Ister and The
Widower.
What seems to
me like a coherent spectrum may to others resemble more
an action painting, but we know that Jackson Pollock's
works were highly structured! I hope that you have inclination
to dip in at both ends of this spectrum and I wish you
stimulating viewing.
Anne Démy-Geroe
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| Åsshåk: Tales from the
Sahara |
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The Land Has Eyes |
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Raymundo |
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