FESTIVAL ROUNDUP



 

Miami Film Festival

Save your postage. From the over 300 submissions sent to the Miami Film Festival this year, not one was accepted. And in previous years? Well, an unsolicited short might have been lucky enough to squeak in.

Miami for the uninitiated is the love child of Nat Chediak and his penchant for quality world cinema. This fest just celebrated its 16th birthday but with only a splattering of American indies present. But then there aren’t that many slots to fill. Just room for 31 films and 7 shorts plus all the Baileys Original Irish Cream you could drink. (It’s certainly nice to have a sponsor who springs for the booze at every screening.)

But why so little U.S. representation? "There’s nothing wrong with American independents," the tastefully bearded Chediak explained. "This year, in fact, I think I have a very exciting cross section of American independents. It’s not our reason for being but we have for example, Tod Williams’ The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, Tony Bui with Three Seasons, plus Tony Goldwyn and A Walk on the Moon. Then there’s Sebastián Gutiérrez who may be Venezuelan but who shot his first feature, Judas Kiss, in Hollywood. We’re not Sundance but we still have a sampler."

And that sampler is gathered from sightseeing at the international film festivals Chediak religiously attends: Cannes, Toronto, Montreal, Berlin. What he goes for are the high quality films that are technically perfect with an often political bent. Also, considering his home base, if the dialogue’s spoken in Spanish, that’s a plus.

"By the year 2010," Chediak explains, "Hispanics are supposed to be the number one minority in America, and I think the offerings for them right now in all the media — radio, TV and film — are abysmal. I think they’re below the level of common knowledge. Advertisers are going to have to broaden that market in order to reach an audience that refuses to just accept the lowest common denominator in entertainment. Nothing short of a revolution needs to take place. The marketplace will demand that such a thing happen, and we actually might be at the forefront of that revolution in at least calling attention to quality Spanish language film." Proof of the pudding is that every Spanish-language film booked at the fest’s state-of-the-art venue, the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, was sold out — and we’re talking 1,700 seats. (Miami, it should also be known, was the first U.S. festival to showcase Almodovar.)

This year, sadly, there was no new Almodovar product. Making up for this loss were Carlos Saura’s Oscar-nominated Tango, Alejandro Agresti’s Wind with the Gone, Alejandro Saderman’s Little Thieves, Big Thieves, Francisco J. Lombardi’s Don’t Tell Anyone, Manuel Gómez Pereira’s Between Your Legs, and eight others. Add Bertolucci’s Besieged which had Thandie Newton drooling again as she did in Beloved; Goran Paskaljevic’s powerful look at Belgrade violence, The Powder Keg; and Francis Veber’s hilarious The Dinner Game, and you get a taste of the venture. By the way, Veber, who wrote La Cage aux Folles, revealed that Steven Spielberg had just bought the rights to remake his film about a group of rich men who invite morons to a monthly supper party.

A great roster of films aside, there are a few minor downsides to the festival. Only two films are shown a night on weekdays, five a day on weekends. But once the screenings are over, there’s not really a festival ambiance to submerge yourself in unless you want to knock knees each evening with George Hamilton at his bar, the official festival chitchat room. Yes, he’s there and you can touch his tan if you’re polite.

Otherwise, unless you have a car, you’re stuck in one of the most barren areas of Miami, at the less than exciting Doubletree Grand. This hotel, where the press, the talent, and the film festival personnel are stationed, is connected to a down-and-out shopping mall where the major store was J.C. Penney — and it’s gone out of business. You’re stuck between purchasing incense or sunning with the likes of Mayor Giuliani by the pool. Thank heavens, he kept his shirt on.

Another complaint by some directors was that although the Festival supplied the plane tickets and covered the housing costs, no food was supplied. Not even a bagel. In the press room you had a choice of lollipops and mostly overripe fruit. Bernie Ijdis, the talented but poor and rumpled Dutch helmer of the Cuban documentary, Riviera Hotel, noted, "Everything would be perfect if they would have food coupons. But they paid for the trip and hotel so I manage with the food. Maybe it’s not fair to complain."

Elodie Bouchez, star of The Dreamlife of Angels, agreed about not complaining. She was flown in with her mother and received a five minute standing ovation after her screening. "It’s cool to think you can have this effect on people. Yeah, that’s always better to have this kind of reaction than the opposite."

Jeremy Thomas, who’s better known for producing Crash and The Last Emperor, was also quite chipper with the reception of his directorial debut, All the Little Animals, which starred John Hurt and Christian Bale. "Nat invited the film and it’s its first screening in America. This is a personal film and it needs a way of getting people to know about it. We don’t have big movie stars so Miami is perfect to get the word of mouth going."

Even Germany’s Rudolph Thome with his Tiger-Stripe Woman Waits for Tarzan was in good spirits although his afternoon screening attracted only 300 filmgoers. Why so exuberant? One attendee was his long-time guru who lives in Florida. She traveled hundreds of miles for the screening and was quite happy with what she saw. Any festival that makes a guru gleeful has a lot going for it.



 
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© 2005 Filmmaker Magazine