Montreal, Thessaloniki, Torino and The Film Noir Festival—1993

Filmmaker Magazine
Winter 1993

For Fun

MONTREAL, THESSALONIKI, TORINO, AND THE FILM NOIR FESTIVAL 

by Noah Cowan 

Knee-deep in the commerce and glamour of a Venice, Toronto or New York, film festivals can often seem like elaborate excuses for champagne-soaked shmoozathons. But after the confetti has settled and the club kids have moved on, a different kind of event shows its face. Low-­key and focused squarely on the art of cinema, the so­called “medium-sized” festivals have long histories of inventive programming and faithful audiences. They may not attract the major art-house buyers or the gos­sipy press, but these festivals, each very different, have much to offer independent filmmakers and their proge­ny. 

A well-kept secret for most of its 22 years, Montreal’s Festival International du Nouveau Cinema et de la Vidéo has increasingly come to the attention of serious cinephiles. Held this year from October 21–31 in a for­mer Jewish area located in the heart of French-speaking Canada, its ambience of le deli, le disco and smoky cafe culture serves as the perfect backdrop for a challenging program of independent film and video. 

The main force behind Montreal’s line up is co-director and founder Dimitri Eipides, a staunch defender, along with co-director Claude Chamberlan, of smaller, laid­back film happenings. “Specialized film festivals must exist to promote a certain type of cinema, which celebrates subjects based in art, not commerce,” Eipides insists. “Let's face it. With the continuing attacks of television, cinema is no longer that popular with the public at large, so it’s essential that events such as these promote the medium and create a public that knows what to expect.”

Although the guest list is small, the Montreal Festival regularly welcomes the big names of art cinema—Wim Wenders, a frequent visitor, has called it “the best festi­val in North America.” Filmmakers especially like its casual atmosphere, with directors and audience milling around after screenings debating things cinematic. 

This year the festival saw a number of important pre­mieres, including the first North American showings of Derek Jarman’s Blue, Wenders’s Faraway, So Close! and the second installment of Edgar Reitz’s mag­num opus about past-war Germany, Heimat II. The Fes­tival opened with home-town boy François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, picked up by Goldwyn for release in 1994. 

All, however, did not run smoothly. Last minute can­cellations of Peter Greenaway’s Baby of Macon and Allison Anders’s Mi Vida Loca caused mass confusion at the cinemas. Projection, usually strong, was pretty abysmal this year—in one cinema, I saw two different prints burn within a few hours; in another, constant focus problems made for collective migraines. 

Nonetheless, a well-deserved Best Feature Film prize was awarded to Ning Ying for her charming tale of aged amateur Beijing Opera singers, For Fun. (Ning’s movie has become something of a festival juggernaut, triumph­ing also in Tokyo and San Sebastian.) Best Documen­tary went to Ray Muller’s extraordinary three-hour opus, The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Reifenstahl. Best Video was Burt Barr’s The Pool, a portrait of a frustrated swimmer. Said the New York-based video artist: “This is probably the predominant film festival in the world that really highlights video.”

There is some truth to this. A big buzz always accom­panies the festival’s video program. But it is Eipides’s international film selection that remains the core of this event, a core he is currently transposing to the “New Horizons” program of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece. 

Set on a picturesque bay in the North Aegean sea, Greece’s second largest city is a charming mish-mash of smart shops, fabulous restaurants and ancient ruins. The festival itself takes place throughout the city, with two main cinemas near the water and two in town for repeats and retrospectives, this year on David Cronenberg and Jules Dassin. (By the way, Dassin’s Two Smart People, starring Lucille Ball, and Thieves Highway are film noir classics which deserve a second look. Rumor has it that MoMA is preparing a show.)

Thessaloniki was a strictly Greek-only affair until 1991 when director Michel Demopoulos approached Eipides to create New Horizons, a broad selection of new inter­national independent cinema. Its inclusion doubled the size of the festival, and made available a new pool of titles for the festival's official competition. 

This provided Eipides with a new set of challenges. “Although my main criterion as a programmer is my own personal taste, I try to differentiate between the two festival audiences. The Montreal public has been accustomed to more adventurous work because I have had 20 years to work on them. I am still learning about Thessaloniki. I don’t want to alienate them, but so far they seem to like the films I like.”

One litmus test for Eipides this year was Gregg Araki’s hipster snapshot of gay LA teens, Totally F***ed Up. Even though the Greeks are often credited with invent­ing homosexuality, Eipides was quite anxious about the film’s reception in this still-religious nation. He shouldn't have worried. Even with an impossible subti­tling task—the film is, like, totally half surfer slang—the crowd seemed to get it and like it very much. 

Other New Horizons hits included Oliver Assayas’s challenging exploration of family and cinema, Une Nou­velle Vie from France and Mohammed Ali Talebi’s spare, moving The Boots from Iran. In Official Competi­tion, American Sara Driver’s When Pigs Fly—a kind of ghost story—and From the Snow by Greece’s own Sotiris Goritsas, about two Greek Albanians caught between cultures, received warm applause despite a lukewarm reception for both films from the international delegates. 

Competition prizes went out to Goritsa’s' From the Snow (Golden Alexander), Ilkka Jarvilaturi’s crazy Estonian caper, Darkness in Tallinn, Pericles Hour­soglou’s Lefteris and For Fun (Best Director, Best Actor). Although nothing burned, cinemas were all without proper 16mm masking, a situation which appar­ently will be rectified next year. 

Immediately following Thessaloniki on the festival cal­endar is the Festival Internazionale Cinema Giovanni of Torino. Now in its 11th year, Torino is probably the best example in the world of a relaxed medium-sized festival, committed to discovering emerging young talent and challenging local audiences with difficult material. 

With its imposing Savoy palaces, marbled footpaths, and store-front colonnades chilled by November wind, the Torino natives are pretty much compelled to troop into the Mas­simo complex where all screenings—compe­tition, out-of-competition, Italian shorts and a special silent series—unfold in three cine­mas. (In past years, a second complex has housed a large retrospective, but budget cuts have temporarily axed this.) 

Festival director Alberto Barbera seems to have a knack for discovering raw cinematic talent. His selections, while often compro­mised by technical and narrative glitches, still convey a real excitement about filmmaking as process and product. Says Barbera: “My aim is clear: to explore independent cinema out­side the commercial and state-sanctioned mainstream ... I look to filmmakers who exper­iment with the form, language and production of film, like American no-budget filmmakers; and I look for emerging talents, people who confront society’s main problems in new ways and seek new forms of expression, imagina­tion and creation.”

To balance these competing agendas, Bar­bera tends to place the riskier, lower budget films in competition and the bigger (and more commercial) productions out of competition. Even so, most of the films that won jury awards—like Tsai Ming-Liang’s dynamic gangster saga, Rebels of The Neon God and Kato Tetsu’s interminable coming-of-age film, The Singing Bamboo—were the more techni­cally accomplished. A major exception was The Last Cold Days, a brilliant Kasakhstani film which was runner-up in the the Competi­tion. Shot quickly with mostly amateurs in sub-zero temperatures, it is a brutal and unsentimental portrait of starving children in post-war Central Asia. 

Other interesting films in competition were Austrian Florian Flicker’s slice of futurist cool, Half World, which marries William Gib­son to H.G. Wells and Alphaville to Liquid Sky, and Portugal's Joao Guerra’s enigmatic road movie, Far from Here. 

The out-of-competition section generally had a safer selection, which ranged from the very good, like Zhang Yuan’s Chinese rock guerril­la flick Beijing Bastards, to the simply appalling, like Rob Weiss’s movie-of-the-week-styled gangster pie, Amongst Friends. The only major revelation was Ishii Takashi’s new film, A Night in Nude, which blows the lid off film noir conventions in astounding ways. 

Torino also has a prestigious short film competition, compiled in half-hour programs before the evening feature screenings. The winner this year was American Michael Costanza’s Mama Said, a three-minute inter­cut of re-created footage of the Shirelles and ’60s civil rights protest footage. Costanza sees the festival “as low-key but important because of the support it gives young, upcoming film­makers, and its appreciation for shorts. It’s a very good festival, and the $2,500 will pay my rent!” Costanza expects to be at Sundance in January with his new short, Cruel and Unusu­al. 

Between budget cuts and fierce competition with Europe’s heavyweights (Berlin, Cannes, Venice), it was a tough year for Barbera. He was candid about the shrinking space for festi­vals like his: “These big festivals are on a car­nivorous trend of eating up everything in sight. But when your criteria is about quantity, that means films get lost, they cannot be prop­erly supported. American independents partic­ularly seem to believe that one of the Big Three is crucial for a European release, even if they are on at midnight. But this strategy is dangerous.”

And what does Torino have to offer instead? “We have acquired a certain reputation for being a serious and well-organized festival which supports films in every section. We have attracted audiences with independent cinema—and they create momentum for cer­tain key films here every year. I think certain films are better helped by gradual word-of­-mouth than a big bang.”

Film noir, the mystery novel, true crime TV and the bandits of Italian politics all fall under the rubric of Noir Festival, an interesting spe­cialized event in a crowded calendar of Italian festivals. 

The setting is beautiful Courmayeur in the Italian Alps, usually known as one of Europe’s most exclusive ski resorts. But this festival is less about hitting the slopes than finding a way for creative people working in an unrec­ognized medium to interact in a relaxed atmosphere. 

Why noir? Festival director Giorgio Gosetti sees “film noir and mystery as confronting and revealing our underlying social face ... these films and novels provide our best key to understanding our chaotic reality.”

A dozen features and ten shorts in competi­tion, plus a sidebar of noir in Eastern Europe and some TV films and documentaries made up the film program. The competition was pri­marily American, with Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding and William Curran’s Love, Cheat and Steal as the obvious crowd pleasers. The best film here, though, was the wildly inven­tive tale of two motorcycle racers and their passion for the cinema, 23h58.

Each afternoon also saw a new episode from Showtime’s noir-ish tv series, Fallen Angels, which features unexceptional directorial debuts from Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise. 

Noir Festival used to take place by the sea at Viareggio in summer, where it attracted mobs of curious tourists. This, its first year in Courmayeur, was not a great public success, with sparse crowds made up mostly of invited guests. But with Geneva and Chamonix less than an hour away, and next year’s dates set for mid-December—high season on the slopes—this unique event looks set to grow up fast.