22 December 2007

MARRAKESH: Feature films from Estonia, Russia, the Philippines, Finland and South Korea took top honors at this year's Marrakesh International Film Festival, which wrapped up its seventh edition with a closing ceremony last Saturday night. The awards supported the pre-festival predictions of artistic director Bruno Barde, who pegged the strengths of the competition - which fielded 15 films from as many countries - on selections from Asia and Eastern Europe.

"The jury has finished its deliberations and let me tell you it was not easy," said Czech-born filmmaker Milos Forman, who presided over those jury debates, during the closing ceremony. Citing the wild diversity of subjects and styles evident in the competition, Forman explained: "We are not pretending to be objective or always just. But our discussions were always open and honest."

Then British actor John Hurt, one of the jury's nine members, announced the winner of the prize for best actress: Yu Yun-mi, the child star of "With a Girl of Black Soil," directed by South Korean filmmaker Jeon Soo-il, who picked up the prize on Yun-mi's behalf. Easily the most artfully composed film in the competition - about mounting desperations among the residents of a rural town where the coal mines are closing, the economy is collapsing and the landscape itself is rubbing its inhabitants out of existence - "With a Girl of Black Soil" elicited sporadic and spontaneous bouts of applause during its screening last Friday afternoon.

But Hurt, whether purposefully or not, articulated the unease of many when he said: "We have seen some really, truly interesting films." Not good, not great, but interesting.

Actresses Parker Posey, Aissa Maiga and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon jointly awarded Tommi Korpela the best actor prize for the Finnish film "Man's Job," a rather daring competition pick about a man who, after losing his job but failing to inform his wife, prostitutes himself to make ends meet.

The jury broke with convention this year and doled out not one but two jury prizes, for the Russian film "The Hard-Hearted," by Alexey Mizgirev, an edgy but predictable account of life in lawless Moscow, and for "Slingshot," by the Philippines' Brillante Mendoza, a gritty, highly experimental feature about a pack of young thieves in Manila. (A strong theme coursing throughout the competition was films dealing with the effects of extreme poverty of children, who try - and more often than not fail - to steal their way out of destitution.)

"We did this film in 10 days," said Mendoza during the ceremony, holding the award close to his chest. "I shot it on a shoestring budget. This [prize] confirms my belief in the kind of films I want to make. And it's dedicated to all the filmmakers here today. You all have your own stories to tell. This is for you."

Then French film icon Catherine Deneuve, resplendent in a Moroccan-inspired gown and graceful as ever, made a guest appearance to award the Golden Star for best film to Estonian director Veiko Ounpuu's "Autumn Ball." Dwelling on choice moments in the lives of six people living in a Soviet-era tower block, the film was a favorite among festival audiences and jury members alike, and an obvious choice for the top prize. Producer Katrin Klessa accepted the award on Ounpuu's behalf, addressing the largely francophone crowd gathered in the Palais des Congres and telling the audience, in English: "We don't speak the same language but we share one, which is humanism."

This was the seventh edition of the Marrakesh film festival. It is modeled, almost exactly, on the grand film festivals in Venice and Cannes. It faltered through its first few years, opting for star-studded spectacle over quality films. But it has since gained its footing under the stewardship of Barde, who has been on board as the festival's artistic director for four years.

"It is difficult to organize a new festival in Marrakesh," said Barde before the event opened, by phone from Paris. "Of course it is beautiful but the only thing that can make a difference is to show good films."

Indeed, the festival as a whole made good on that claim. Tributes to Japanese cineaste Shinji Aoyama, Bronx-born indie renegade Abel Ferrera, Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, Moroccan filmmaker Mustapha Derkaoui, arch-Italian modernist Michelangleo Antonioni, the incomparable Ingmar Bergman and Tunisian producer Ahmed Baha Attia were not to be missed, nor were the homage to 100 years of Egyptian film or the panorama dedicated to recent Moroccan cinema.

Organizers made a number of astute programming choices, such as slotting the Arabic films into screening sessions held in four theaters (Le Colisee and the cinemas Rif, Saada, Mabrouka and Megarama) scattered throughout the newer and older quarters of the city, venues sure to attract the loyalties of the local public first (and the adventurous wanderings of the foreign and largely French press corps shipped in for the festival a distant second). Suited up to endure the night chill that seeps into Marrakesh after sundown, one could have enjoyed only the open-air screenings on the Jemaa al-Fna as an essential festival experience in and of itself.

But the competition - along with the lineup of films screening out of competition and for the Coup de Coeur section - just barely cut it as far as quality is concerned. A festival narrowly and nearly claustrophobically focused on conventional narrative features, Marrakesh this year offered an onslaught on bleak human dramas, syncopated suspense flicks and formulaic thrillers.

For all the international diversity, established patterns laid the ground for commonplace storylines. In the aftermath of some status quo breakdown, the moral compass will shatter and ruthless capitalism with rapaciously fill the void. Otherwise good, honest characters will be reduced to abject cruelty, clumsy criminality and even cold-blooded murder. And then, in the end, despite all the tragic twists and turns cued by overwhelmingly melodramatic and deafeningly similar musical scores, they will all likely lose for not being smart enough to outwit the march of globalization and its discontents. 

"With a Girl of Black Soil" may have been artful, "Slingshot" may have been experimental, but the competition exposed a profound lack of narrative innovation, of new strategies to tell enduring stories, of dexterity and playfulness while messing around with the arrangement and rhythm of images and sounds. In addition to the absence of aesthetic impulse, there was also very little palpable political urgency in these films, outside of bland, background generalizations about the post-Cold War system or the aforementioned effects of globalization.

What place has the Marrakesh International Film Festival carved out for itself in the world or in the region? It can't, and won't ever, compete with Venice or Cannes. Marrakesh isn't, despite the festival's francophone vibe or the thinly veiled desires of its organizers and adherents, an outlying province of France. In the Arab world, certainly there should be more festivals not less, but must they be held at the exact same time? Marrakesh opened the day the Cairo International Film Festival closed and ran concurrent with the Dubai International Film Festival. This simultaneity does a disservice primarily to filmmakers (and audience members with the means to travel) who must choose one event or the other. And where that hurts most is with regional cinema, which all the festivals in the Arab world should, it seems, be jointly promoting, especially at a time when cultural production in the Middle East is exposed rarely when compared to the region's daily export of dismal news items.

Two of the films competing at Marrakesh - Algeria's "The Other Side of the Mirror" and Morocco's "Samira's Garden" - were particularly disappointing and potentially misleading, especially if taken (as some attending critics indeed took them) as the best or only examples Arab narrative cinema has to offer. ("Samira's Garden" is an important film for the taboos it breaks, but far better films from the region have circulated in 2007).

At the closing ceremony, a French journalist who has attended six of the festival's seven editions described both films, fairly enough, as "disastrous," but added that Marrakesh must screen them because "we" must help "them," these sad sack, Third World countries that produce so few films of merit. This is not the impression the Marrakesh film festival should leave when the red carpet is rolled up. The problem lies in the selection, not in the availability of quality films from the Arab world. Not for nothing do the Cairo and Dubai film festivals organize entire competitions around Arab cinema.

Marrakesh has reportedly been under pressure to increase the presence of Moroccan and Arab films in the festival. The screenings of vintage Egyptian fare, the Moroccan panorama and - to a certain extent - the out of competition screenings of Nabil Ayouch's "Whatever Lola Wants" (nauseating but sure to succeed at the box office), Daoud Aoulad-Syad's "Waiting for Pasolini" (striking but troublesome) and Youssef Chahine's "Chaos" (an insufferable soap opera that is also sure to be a smash hit) go some distance to redress the balance. But the organizers behind Marrakesh will have to do more when it comes to the competition.