#4
Meaningful Hopes In the Perspectives of the Anonymous Cinematography Nations
The 47th Thessaloniki Film Festival permanently strives to diminish the domination of those ‘cinematography giants’ and to ignore their aggressive approach on the film market and film festivals (as many others film festivals in Europe, Asia and even in America). At this year’s competition program at the Thessaloniki Film Festival, as well at the other ten, nicely conceived and realized Festival sections, were films that can be hardly find at the Programs of any glamorous film festival, and even less on the commercial cinemas’ repertoires. Must be mentioned that after the appointing of the energetic Despina Mouzaki at the wheel of the Festival, this tendency gets its highpoint. Seems that the anonymous film authors became favorites not only of the audience, but also of the critics, and of course, at the critics it comes with a significant portion of anxiety about the eventual success or failure of their favorite film hope. Indicative is the fact of the new trend of the audience’s interest for the authors they never heard of. It was really ‘cute’ phenomenon – their persistence and firmness in the intention to get an extra ticket even at the third projection of the film that came from Mali, called Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, a social drama in which, without any pathetic and pompous intentions, the vanity, manipulation and the corruption of the American and European humanitarian organizations. Along with the almost documentarily projected hypocrisy of the wealthy societies upon the poor inhabitants of this African country, Sissako tells the tragic story of the freshly married couple’s agony between their vain expectations for thorough understanding and sincere help by their ‘supposed to be’ benefices.
#5 Bamako is only one of the many examples that confirm the thesis that the audience – with high sympathies – shares the pre-occupations of the new generations of film authors who aren’t really in some ecstatic quest for new themes and visual expressions, but in an attempt to show the things and ideas through their own individual sensibility. And this new sensibility isn’t a cliché in which the usual themes of solitude, boldness, motherhood, family or friendship aren’t fixed or rigid, so they don’t turn into a vague emblem of the past, or of even distinguished desires and intentions. It’s a certain new look upon the issues that we meet on daily bases, trying to comprehend them and their source of origin. The hero’s destiny, as of the leading character in the Brazilian film Suely in the Sky by, Karim Aïnouz – this year’s Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize, is a destiny of a film characters that repeat from one to another film consequently since the years of the neo-realism. But the character of the female leading role, the young Hermila, is the complex and unpredictable in a unique and refreshing way. Why she – such light-minded, starts to hook herself on the streets, the viewer would ask, usually conditioned to take the traditional psychological and ethical clichés for granted, when there are other solutions for her to save her integrity and protect her son. Why she casts away her friends and accepts the support of those dubious drifters? The author of the film doesn’t hold the ambitions to unsolved this dilemmas, but none can dispute with the bizarre universe of the Brazilian province, fulfilled with fake and exotic phantoms, served by Hollywood dream-factories, in a manner such as its clients desire – to see how those fake phantoms allude and seduce us. Not less intriguing are the dilemmas of the protagonists of the South-Korean representative, the film Family Ties, directed by the young Kim Tae-yong, the Winner of the Main Prize – The Golden Alexander. They live in the urban ambient of a Korean metropolis and they live by the traditional bonds of their society; in many aspects they seem like any other Korean average family. But their solitude and their wish to perform the happy and fulfilled life together as all other families do, have such bitter sorrow, that one wishes (during watching the film) those golden chains of enforced (by tradition) community to be broken once for all, so the repressed dreams, silenced sins and the sweet lies ‘hidden under the rag’ to emerge out and free themselves.