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Thessaloniki Film Festival

Walking out of the Olympia Theaters, the large, plush halls where Competition films at the 38th Thessaloniki Film Festival unspooled, one could gaze out towards the ocean at the seaships and tankers sitting shrouded under dramatic folds of fog and mist. The view recalled nothing so much as a scene from a film by Greece’s premiere art-film export, Theo Angelopoulos, director of such works as The Beekeeper and, yes, Landscapes in the Mist. And by turning one’s head to the side, one could track along the water towards the shoreline where, this year at Thessaloniki, there was Angelopoulos himself, along with his great d.p., Yorgos Arvenides, shooting his latest film with actor Bruno Ganz. Visitors to this year’s Festival – and Europe’s 1997 cultural capital – were invited on set to watch Angelopoulos direct as his small crew moved around the town, from the overcast seaside to the neon-lit ouzeris, keeping watch over the Festival during its ten-day proceedings.

Todd Verow's Little Shots of Happiness. Photo: Todd Verow.

A safe haven for art cinema, Thessaloniki, held every November in this affluent Northern port city, screens a few obligatory Hollywood films – The Edge, The Peacemaker – but concentrates mostly on both new and retrospective director-driven filmmaking. Indeed, most remarkable about Thessaloniki is its attention to filmic surveys. This year, one could see complete retros of Claude Chabrol, Arturo Ripstein, Takis Kannellopoulos, and Manoel De Oliveira and several films each by Errol Morris, Tsai Ming-liang, Aleksandr Sokurov, and Tony Gatlif. And, given its geography, Thessaloniki pays special attention to new Balkan cinema with a special sidebar section.

The Competion, programmed by Michel Demopoulos, featured mostly young directors with their first or second films. Dervis Zaim’s Somersault in a Coffin was announced as the first independent film produced in Turkey. The neorealist inspired no-budget film depicts a homeless man who one day steals a prized peacock from the state castle. The film has something to say about politics and the media but most striking was its fusion of neorealism, narrative ellipses, and eerie expressionist gestures. Also in Competition was Lee Chang-dong’s Green Fish. In some ways a standard-issue crime melodrama, complete with a nightclub singer femme fatale and dueling gangster bosses, the Korean film was graced by a precise visual style and a sympathetic social conscience. Also in Competition were U.S. indie In the Company of Men, Shane Meadows’ poignant but overrated TwentyFourSeven, and Croat filmmaker Zoran Solumun’s rather thin Tired Companions, an anthology film about refugees fleeing the former Yugoslavia. The jury awarded its top prize to Australian Sue Brooks and her Road to Nhill; Somersault in a Coffin received the Special Jury Award.

Thessaloniki also features a National Competition that promotes the year’s crop of Greek films. (Next year, the National Competition is to be abolished and some worry that this will have a deleterious effect on the Greek film industry.) One of the Festival’s popular favorites, Renos Haralambis’ No-Budget Story, was found in this section. The comedic tale of a filmmaker struggling against the Greek state subsidy system, the film drew a young audience and enormous laughs for its skewering of precisely the sort of highbrow art pics helmed by Angelopolous.

More than a little inspired by In the Soup, No-Budget Story was shot on video and transferred to black-and-white film. The likable Haralambis worked as a "trash-TV" actor and called in favors to fund this gentle satire. "I had submitted 11 scripts to the Greek film center," he said. "You have to be older than 35 [to get funded]. It takes one year to write the script, two years for them to read it, and then you wait one year to start shooting. If the government changes, maybe you lose your money!"

Energized by the American no-budget movement ("Americans are cool; Greeks are not cool – we are heavy," Haralambis said), the director "took small bits from ten movies – In the Soup, Barton Fink, Living in Oblivion, Smoke" – and reworked them into humorous set pieces laced with Greek in-jokes. For Haralambis, the highlight of the Festival was a conversation with Chabrol, who liked his film and offered to try to sell it to French TV – "Angelopoulos was the translator!" Haralambis laughed.

In addition to the competitions, Thessaloniki boasts a huge section of young cinema, New Horizons, curated by legendary festival programmer Dimitri Eipides. "Small independent festivals around the world have taken up the task of making film culture," said Eipides. New Horizons is comprised, he says, "of films that have distinguished themselves in other festivals, and work by first-time directors." He adds, "To me, both are important."

It was here, accordingly, that I caught up with Tsing Ming-liang’s The River, winner of the Silver Bear at the 1997 Berlin Film Festival. The story of a young teen suffering a painful and inexplicable infection after appearing as an extra in a low-budget film, The River, much like Todd Haynes’ Safe, generates enormous empathy and compassion for a protagonist defined by the most minimal of means. Cleverly manipulating a familiar set of themes and elements – storms, rain, and the fractured nuclear family – Taiwan’s Ming-liang has made a formally controlled, emotionally wrenching masterpiece. His last film, Vive L’Amour was distributed here by Strand; let’s hope that this even more accomplished film can get play in the States.

"Women on the verge" was a popular theme in New Horizons. In Yolande Zauberman’s Clubbed to Death, a young French girl falls asleep on a bus, wakes up at a rave concert, and winds up stealing the black lover of club diva Beatrice Dalle. Unfortunately, Clubbed to Death’s filmmaking wasn’t strong enough to lend insight to its trendy storyline. Better was Carine Adler’s Under the Skin, in which a sex-obsessed London clubgoer struggles with the death of her mother. Marred by a saccharine ending, the film still impresses by virtue of Samantha Morton’s fierce performance and Adler’s captivating blend of beautiful, Nan-Goldenish cinematography, jarring jump cuts, and haunting fantasy sequences. However, I liked best of all Todd Verow’s Little Shots of Happiness, a no-budget, tape-to-film story of a young office worker who turns to booze and casual sex after a split with her husband. Sloppily mixing Fassbinder and Warhol to a techno beat, Verow’s film has wit, raw energy, and tremendously endearing performance by Bonnie Dickenson.

Other New Horizons titles included Larry Fessenden’s creepily compelling urban vampire flick Habit, Rachel Reichman’s cool look at labor and libido, Work, and Baille Walsh’s transfixing story of New York transsexual Consuela Cosmetic, Mirror, Mirror. Also featured in the program was Robert Guediguian’s Marius and Jeanette. Produced for under $1 million by France’s Agat/Ex Nihilio, the film scored at the French box-office by lacing a simple lonely-hearts romance with a series of witty and lighthearted meditations on French class politics. Charming and accessible, Guediguian mixes the personal and the political in a way that eludes most American independents.

Thessaloniki is not much of a business festival, although its careful programming and beautiful location draws a larger group of European producers and distributors than one would expect. An American independent probably won’t find a deep-pocketed foreign sales agent here; a sale to Greek television is more likely. Still, the Festival’s focus on art cinema is so strong (Eipides notes that the Fest was an early champion of Greenaway and Hal Hartley) and its audiences so receptive that a presence at Thessaloniki can offer younger filmmakers the chance to begin building the international reputation needed to sustain the continued production of challenging work into the future.



 
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