2008 MVFF31 Latinbeat: Spain—Eskalofrío (Shiver)

"Small village, big hell."—old Basque proverb.

Frequent startle jolts in Isidro Ortiz's Eskalofrío (Shiver) are determined to make you yelp outloud, even if perhaps a little too obviously. Yet another film that I first heard about on Twitch, Shiver premiered in the Panorama section of this year's Berlinale to tepid critical response. Expectation factored heavily as audiences went into the film assuming it to be a horror flick when, in truth, it's more a competent thriller with some horror tropes deferentially approached though never fully developed. Few disagree that the film is professionally mounted, the performances solid, and that it respectfully carries on the tradition of Spanish "horror" films like The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage, borrowing—in fact—teenage actor Junio Valverde from Backbone, Labyrinth's Oscar-winning set designer Pilar Revuelta, and The Orphanage's composer Fernando Velázquez to firm up its genre pedigree. Past that, failed expectations dampened Shiver's reception.

Originally working with an idea by Antonio Trashorras and David Muñoz (also from The Devil's Backbone) called Sangre (Blood) where a young man who is allergic to sunlight believes he's a vampire and ends up meeting true vampires, budget restraints kept this initial concept from being fully developed in Shiver, although the idea is referenced in Shiver's opening nightmare sequence where Santi (Valverde) is shown frantically fleeing the approaching dawn in Barcelona, a city architected with reflective surfaces. As sunlight catches up to him, his skin begins to blister, and he bursts into flames. Santi awakens in a cold sweat from a nightmare that has skillfully laid out his worst fears. Leaving this arresting nightmare behind, the film pursues a practical thread. Because Santi's photosensitivity is increasingly becoming hazardous to his health, his mother (in a fine turn by Mar Sodupe)—following the advice of Santi's physician—seeks out a shadow-laden village hidden away in Spain's mountain ravines so that Santi will be less exposed to sunlight and have more of a chance of leading an average adolescence.

In all fairness to Shiver, this is an equally engaging concept: Santi must flee the light to take refuge in darkness, what Ortiz calls a "back to front tale", and though Santi's not actually a vampire, the oddity of his infirmity makes him "monstrous" to the so-called "normal" villagers. In other words, Ortiz effectively turns the tropes upside down and offers two kinds of monsters: those who are "different" and cannot adapt to what society defines as normal, and those who—though models of social conformity—hide monstrous impulses within.

When something feral in the forest begins tearing the throats out of livestock, classmates, and eventually adults, suspicion falls on Santi because of his strange ways. Confronting his own fears, Santi must prove his innocence by uncovering what is prowling loose in the woods. As with the hillbilly horror flicks popular in the United States, Shiver exploits—as Screen Daily terms it—"the fright quotient of the closed rural community." (Thus, the proverb prefacing this entry.) Screen Daily likewise observes: "One of the more attractive things about Shiver is the way that it manages not to take itself too seriously without crossing over into outright spoof." Michael Panduro, dispatching to Bloody Disgusting from Berlin, noted: "After the screening in Berlin, director Ortiz explained how the film has been in production for a number of years employing no less than four different screenwriters for adjustment, re-writes and tweaking and—in my opinion—that's where it all went wrong! Draft after draft has pulled the story in different directions ultimately pulling it apart. What starts out as a vampire-story, turns into a tale of a haunted forest, turns into a monster-movie and winds up as typical slasher-fare."

Expectations were equally thwarted when the film screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Filmstalker's Richard Brunton likewise complained that Shiver is "trying to be too many genres in one." Quiet Earth was more disposed to accept the film on its own merits, praising that Shiver is "a film that is extremely intense, taut and outright terrifying in parts but also darkly comic with a deliberate knack for confounding expectations."

Perhaps that's the key? Watch Shiver knowing your expectations will be confounded and you might just enjoy yelping outloud now and then as its young protagonist suffers the burden of persecution and struggles to unravel a mysterious web of deceit. Shiver's MVFF screening precedes its mid-October Dark Sky Films DVD release.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2008 MVFF31 Latinbeat: Chile—Mirageman

Mine is the Latinbeat for this year's Mill Valley Film Festival. Ever since running into Kiltro director Ernesto Diaz and Chilean martial artist Marko Zaror at the 2006 November American Film Market (where he was given the opportunity to view early footage of the duo's latest vehicle Mirageman), Twitch teammate Todd Brown has been unabashedly enthused about the project. In his first dispatch, Todd wrote: "Zaror, impossibly, seems to have gotten even faster since shooting Kiltro in which he was already far too fast and agile for such a big man. There are zero wires in this, zero CGI, so the action is much more raw. According to Zaror they often didn't even pull their punches. It's a bit of an unusual beast style wise, fusing the typical South American verite style with a bit of a 70's low budget Hong Kong chopsocky feel and, yeah, the mask and premise are pretty goofy but in pretty much exactly the right way."

Offering up the first photos for the film, Twitch teammate Mack followed through with a smack more, and Todd added an impressive YouTube training reel of Zaror in action, the amped-up poster, the subtitled trailer and several demo reels. Todd then programmed Mirageman's world premiere at Canada's 2007 Fantasia Film Festival and, eschewing objectivity, gave it a rave (albeit qualified) review. Diaz's script, Todd writes, "does a remarkable job of balancing fantasy with reality, comedy with grit, raw action with sly social parody." His only minor complaint is that "Mirageman has no true fighting match on the villain's side."

Mirageman won Audience Award for Best Film at the 2007 Austin Fantastic Fest and Audience Award for Best Chilean Film at the 2007 Valdivia International Film Festival and—as further reported by Todd at Twitch—the film's March 2008 Chilean premiere was a resounding popular success, launching an anticipated shift to the small screen. Magnolia Pictures has picked up both Mirageman and its predecessor Kiltro for U.S. distribution.

The film's appeal lies not only in the brooding good looks of its lead star, and in its truly impressive action sequences, but in the fact that it capitalizes on the fantasy each and every one of us has to be strong and well-trained enough to kick urban delinquency in its face. Mirageman is not so much a superhero as he is a conscientious vigilante, with all the attendant pros and cons of such a stance. The film's narrative traction is more about how the protagonist adopts his avenging persona once he realizes it has a positive effect on his traumatized younger brother. This is an action film that revolves around considerable heart and entertaining dosages of goofy humor and a wry critique of television media.

Cross-published on Twitch.

2008 MVFF31—Michael Hawley's Line-up Preview

Race. Religion. Politics. According to Mill Valley Film Festival's Director of Programming Zöe Elton, those are subjects to avoid when choosing "something breezy" to open and close a film festival. At a recent press conference to announce this year's line-up, however, she was obviously making ironic note of that supposition. As it turns out, this year's fest is bookended by films steeped in those three volatile topics.

Opening the festival's 31st edition on October 2nd will be Religulous and The Secret Life of Bees. The Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center will host the latest from Borat director Larry Charles, a documentary in which Bill Maher ridicules the world's three major monotheistic religions. Over in Mill Valley, the Sequoia Theater will screen the west coast premiere of Gina Prince-Bythewood's tale of race relations in 1964 South Carolina, starring Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo. Larry Charles and Dakota Fanning are expected to attend their respective films on opening night.

The Sequoia's October 12th closing night film will be the U.S. premiere of Israeli director Eran Riklis' Lemon Tree. The film is his follow up to 2004's acclaimed The Syrian Bride, and stars Hiam Abbass (The Visitor) as a Palestinian widow struggling to save her family's ancestral lemon grove. Meanwhile at the Rafael Film Center, actress Alfre Woodard gets a closing night tribute in her honor. A clips reel and on-stage interview will be followed by a screening of her latest film, American Violet, in which she portrays a mother determined to prove the veracity of "innocent until proven guilty" (even for African Americans living in Texas).

Two other actresses being feted at this year's fest are Sally Hawkins and Harriet Andersson. Hawkins appears in connection with the U.S. Premiere of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, a film for which she took the Best Actress prize at this year's Berlin Film Festival. Andersson is best known for her work with Ingmar Bergman, including Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night, Cries and Whispers and 1961's Through a Glass Darkly, which will be screened at her tribute.

On Tuesday, November 18, the Mill Valley Film Festival will present A Tribute to Tony Curtis at San Francisco's Castro Theater. This post-festival event is being co-produced by impresario Marc Huestis, who has a long history of staging big-star tributes at the historic movie palace. The esteemed American actor, now 83, will be interviewed on-stage following a program of clips and a screening of Some Like it Hot. Afterward, he'll autograph copies of his new book, American Prince: A Memoir.

Two non-actors receiving tributes this year are screenwriter/director Paul Schrader and screenwriter Eric Roth. Schrader, best known for writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, will appear at Mill Valley with his latest work as director, Adam Resurrected starring Jeff Goldblum. Schrader has directed some interesting films in his career, including Light Sleeper, Auto Focus and perhaps most celebrated of all, 1985's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. A new "enhanced and retouched" 35mm print of Mishima will screen a day after the tribute. Screenwriter Roth's most recent works include The Good Shepherd and Munich (with Tony Kushner), but he's best known (dubiously, perhaps) for his Oscar-winning Forrest Gump screenplay. Roth's Mill Valley tribute will feature clips from his latest, David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

And what of the films that aren't being shown as part of some tribute or special night? After, all, there are over 200 films (roughly half of them features) from 50-plus countries in this year's event. Overall, I'd have to say the selection is a bit more obscure than in recent years. But still, I had no trouble picking out ten that are of great interest to me:

The Wrecking Crew—A lover of 60's pop music, I wouldn't miss this documentary for the world. The Wrecking Crew was a loose group of West Coast studio musicians who played on records by The Mamas and Papas, Sonny and Cher, Nancy Sinatra, The Beach Boys, The Monkees, The Association, The Byrds and many others. Directed by Danny Tedesco, son of famed Wrecking Crew guitarist Tommy Tedesco.

Wendy and Lucy—Kelly Reichardt's follow-up to Old Joy stars Michelle Williams as an Alaska-bound drifter whose life comes apart while stranded in a small Oregon town. A small film that received some of the best reviews of this year's Cannes Film Festival.

My Marlon and Brando—This docudrama about a Turkish actress' journey to rejoin her lover in Iraqi Kurdistan won a Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize at Tribeca for its director, Huseyin Karabey.

They Killed Sister Dorothy—Winner of both the Audience and Jury prizes at this year's SXSW, this documentary is about an American nun killed by wealthy Brazilian ranchers over an Amazon sustainable development project.

Katyn—This film from Polish maestro Andrzej Wajda was one of the five nominees for last year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. The film recounts one of the darkest events in Polish history, when the Soviet Union executed over 15,000 Polish military officers in the spring of 1940.

Teddy Bear—Jan Hrebejk's darkly comic Up and Down was one of my favorite films of 2005 (and one of the very few recent Czech films to get U.S. distribution). I also enjoyed 2006's Beauty in Trouble and am very pleased the festival is bringing us this, his latest. Eddie Cockrell's enthusiastic Variety review seals the deal.

Hafez—At the 2002 SF International Film Festival I was impressed by the Iranian film Delbaran—a spare, poetic tale of a young Afghani refugee working at a remote border truck stop. This is the most recent work by its director, Abolfazl Jalili, and it's about the repressed passions a young religious scholar feels for the western-educated girl he's hired to instruct.

Máncora—The plot of Peruvian director Ricardo de Montreuil's film is being compared to Y tu mamá también—two-guys-and-a-girl take a city-to-beach road trip. The city in this case is Lima, and the beach is the surfer's paradise of Máncora, 750 miles to the north. The last excellent Peruvian film I saw, Claudia Llosa's Madeinusa, was shown at Mill Valley in 2006.

Jodhaa Akbar—From the director of Lagaan comes this new Bollywood epic about the 16th century marriage of a Mughal emperor and a Hindu princess, (screen heartthrobs Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai). Festival programmer Elton described the musical numbers as being "like Busby Berkeley times 100 … with elephants!"

Burning the Future: Coal in America—Although I'm loath to watch yet another documentary about our impending ecological collapse, the trailer for this films has convinced me otherwise.

In addition to these 10 must-see films, here are a few others I'm eye-balling as possibilities: 57000 KM Between Us (Mathieu Amalric as a diaper-fetishist), Archelology of Memory: Villa Grimaldi (Bay Area musician returns to Chile for an accounting of his incarceration by Pinochet's regime), Burned Hearts (a rare narrative feature from Morocco), Cumbia Connection (alienated Mexican youth), Everything is Fine (disaffected French-Canadian youth), Fujian Blue (Michael Guillén recommends this bifurcated tale of gangsters, thugs and criminals living on the edge of China's economic miracle), Heart of Fire (a film about Eritrean child-soldiers from the director of The Story of the Weeping Camel), Hello Stranger (a North Korean immigrant grapples with the realities of living in the capitalist South), Mommy is at the Hairdresser's (it's French Canadian, set in the 50's and has a great title), Quiet Chaos (Nanni Moretti has gotten raves for his performance as a grieving father), RocknRolla (the U.S. premiere of what sounds like a return to form for Guy Ritchie), Stolen (doc about the fishy Mexican presidential election of 2006) and TYPECAST: The Art of Film Titles (a lecture/presentation on the importance of effective movie title sequences).

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF08: UN BARRAGE CONTRE LE PACIFIQUE (THE SEA WALL)—The Evening Class Interview With Rithy Panh

With his fourth narrative feature Un Barrage Contre Le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) boasting its world premiere at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, Rithy Panh adapts the eponymously-entitled 1950 novel by Marguerite Duras—a classic work of French literature—to make a compelling, sumptuous, yet politically astute film about his native country. The legendary Isabelle Huppert stars as the widowed matriarch of a small land-owning family in 1930s French Indochina (now Cambodia), who eke out a living from rice fields located perilously close to the ocean. The mother realizes that the departure of her two grown children—Joseph 20 and Suzanne 16—is ineluctable. Deceived by the colonial administration, she has invested all of her savings in worthless, regularly flooded farmland. Driven to fight against both nature and the corrupt bureaucrats who conned her and threaten expropriation, and refusing to accept the triumphant injustice of the system, she devises an imaginative scheme to build a dam against the sea with the help of the villagers.

As Panh has expressed in his director's statement, "beyond time and cultural differences" he feels a "particular and mysterious connection" with "Marguerite Duras's eye, a very typical oriental compassion, beyond the usual judgments and simplications, an almost 'inner' outlook about my country and people, an eye that doesn't judge, an eye that says, 'We are all alike.' "

In his review for Screen Daily (faithfully replicated by Andy Brouwer), Howard Feinstein finds Panh's adaptation "potent" and draws insightful comparisons with Régis Wargnier's 1992 Academy Award-winning Indochine. By contrast, he writes, Wargnier's film—which starred Catherine Deneuve as a glamorous landowner—"was overblown, brushed with a varnish that disguised the realities of imperialism in tropical climes." He commends Panh's fearlessness in revealing "the worms in a gorgeous world of lush palms and attractive rice paddies in what might otherwise be construed as paradise."

Rithy Panh was born in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. Imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, he escaped in 1979, moving first to the Mairut refugee camp in Thailand, then to Paris, where he studied at L'Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques. His work includes the documentaries S21, la Machine de mort Khmère Rouge (03), Les Gens d'Angkor (03) and Le Papier ne peut pas envelopper la braise (07), the docudrama Les Artistes du Théâtre Brûlé (05), and the features Rice People (94), Un Soir après la guerre (97), Que la barque se brise, que la jonque s'entrouvre (01) and Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (08). My heartfelt thanks to uniFrance for arranging an interview with Rithy Panh and to Isabelle Dupuis for her interpretive assistance.

* * *

Michael Guillén: What drew you to Marguerite Duras' 1950 novel Un Barrage contre le Pacifique?

Rithy Panh: First of all, it's a novel I like immensely and which I kept under my pillow for years. I was attracted to the ideas present in the novel: the colonial theme, the sense of utopia, and how they worked together. It was important for me to show that you cannot live just for yourself. I wanted to show that you have to share the wealth. Generosity is not just about giving but it's also about not taking what is not yours.

Guillén: Since, you say, this was one of your favorite novels, I'm interested in how the novel first came to you, when you first realized it could be a film, and how you went about co-authoring the screenplay with Michel Fessler?

Panh: My first contact with Marguerite Duras was through her screenplay for Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. Having just emerged myself from genocide, Alain Resnais' work on Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour really moved me. Resnais was the filmmaker who made me realize that filmmaking is a tool of expression I could use to express my own story. I was interested in what Duras was writing. At the time, I didn't know French too well so I had to read her books by translating them from French into Cambodian with my dictionary. What came about naturally is that I then began to read other works by Marguerite Duras and to me Un Barrage contre le Pacifique is one of her greatest works. It's the matrix of her entire body of work.

There are two or three elements in the book that interest me. First the two topics of the utopianism and the anti-colonialism. What interested me also was her way of working; how her point of departure is reality from which she always moves towards her fiction. In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, everything is truth but everything is fiction as well. An authentic work has those qualities.

As for Michel Fessler, the co-writer, I didn't know him before we began writing the screenplay. I hired him because he had lived in Africa when he was a child and I was intrigued that he had spent some time in the colonies. More correctly, they were no longer colonies but had been the French colonies. At the beginning I didn't want him to write anything. I wanted him to accompany me on a trip to Cambodia to visit the scouted locations. I wanted him to listen to the sounds of Cambodia, the voices of the Cambodians, to discover the story of the people of that country. It was only after he went through that initiatory phase that we began the writing. Michel's role with regard to the film is complicated. He was to be as disciplined as possible, which enabled me to not have to be so strict.

Guillén: Smart!

Panh: [Laughter.] I could go off and he would have to say, "No, no, you're straying too far. Come back!" We worked so well together that we're going to do another film together.

Guillén: Excellent! How closely do you feel your film adheres to the novel?

Panh: [Sighs.] I think the main dramaturgy remains from the novel. In the movie the questions that revolve around the land rights and the rebellion is emphasized more than in the book, which is normal because a Cambodian directed the film. The film was less about idyllic landscapes or love stories so I could emphasize the political side of Duras rather than her "schmaltzy" side.

Guillén: Which I appreciated. At first I thought, "Oh, this is going to be a colonial romance narrative" and—in a way—it was; but, the romance was not between individuals but rather between a philosophy of resistance and a focus on human dignity. The ideas—infused with sensuality—were rendered accessible.

Panh: Yes, the problem with these geographic locations is that everything appears beautiful, paradisial, but—when you scratch below the surface—there are many hidden complexities. In fact in all of my movies, not only this one, I emphasize human dignity. In all my previous films what's at stake is people's dignities, even in the way they are filmed.

Guillén: Which is why I've remained a great fan of your work over the years. Another theme you frequently pronounce is one of solidarity, which is skillfully enunciated in this film through the alliance between the white French colonist family and the Cambodian villagers against the corrupt colonial forces oppressing them both.

Panh: I'm not so interested in films that are about someone as I am in making a film that allows me to be with someone. Duras is one of the first novelists to have a clear anti-colonialist position. It's no coincidence that on a political level she is very close to the Communist party. But I have to be clear that I've experienced Communist regimes and they weren't that great. Oftentimes people confuse Communism with utopianism. I feel people should attach more importance to utopianism, which has existed long before Communism.

Guillén: I would say that Chris Marker has best expressed the idea that utopia is a dream well worth seeking whereas Communism is an ideology that has all too often failed.

Panh: Exactly! It's so important to hold onto that dream of solidarity, of sharing, of access to knowledge. We don't realize it but in this era of amazing technologies many people nowadays don't have the rights to access images, not even the rights to create images themselves from their own histories.

Guillén: I hear what you're saying. I remember when I was training as a Mesoamericanist, how shocked I was to discover that it was illegal for Mayan Indians in the Yucatan to seek education.

Panh: What's at stake for the future? For filmmakers like me it's not only about making the movie, it's that each film you make is like a form of resistance. It's saying, "I am presenting to you my point of view of history." How many African films have you seen in Toronto this year?

Guillén: None. Interestingly enough, the woman sitting next to me during your film complained that she originally attended the Toronto International Film Festival because it afforded her the chance to see African cinemas, which she argued are becoming less available year after year. As a consequence, she's losing interest in the festival.

Panh: But it's not only the Toronto International Film Festival. It's the whole system of how movies are made. The system is unfair. Commensurably, in the previous century it was the most-developed countries that mastered the reading of written works. In the century we live in now, the richest countries control every aspect of sound and image communication. The smaller countries are condemned to disappear in the digital flow. If there are no movies, festivals obviously can't show them. It's that the distributors don't want them. The producers don't want them. The television stations don't want them.

Guillén: Are you familiar with the instrumental work of the Global Film Initiative which provides financing for script development and post-production costs for filmmakers struggling to make films in such developing countries as Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America? They are advocates for narratives from the Global South.

Panh: I'm working on a project that has nothing to do with my film that I would like to talk to you about?

Guillén: Feel free. I'm listening.

Panh: In Cambodia we created Bophana, an audio-visual resource center. We're trying to gather all kinds of images and sounds from all over the world and to make these resources accessible to all Cambodians. We're also providing professional training for young directors and film technicians. What we're realizing are certain problems: that you can't make a film if you don't have an audio-visual memory. We're trying to make audio-visual memories available to Cambodians. The Center is doing quite well. We're going to work with Burkina Faso. We're going to give our technology and know-how to Burkina Faso. It's one of the first South-South collaborations. We're trying to share what we know in terms of image-making. After that we would like to do the same thing with Senegal, with Lebanon, or Rwanda. We're trying to create a network. What we want to claim is the right to access to images. We have the right to have access to memory. We're not asking for commercial rights—the rightholders can keep them—but, just the right to have access. In Cambodia we don't have the means of accessing our own images. For an African, it's easier to watch films from Brazilian television on Teleglobo than African films. If a people do not have the means of fabricating the sounds and images of their own history, they are doomed to disappear.

Guillén: I commend your Center's objectives and will do all I can to coordinate efforts to further your goals. Returning to your film, if we may, you strike an accomplished balance with—as you said earlier—the hazard of the film's political import being guised by its idyllic veneer. Pierre Millon's cinematography and Yan Arlaud's art direction is so sumptuous, so beautiful, that it's enthralling. In fact, even with your ensemble, I wasn't sure who was more beautiful: Isabelle Huppert or Gaspard Ulliel!

Panh: [Laughter.]

Guillén: I'm not criticizing it, but I do wonder about the value of such physical beauty to express political intent? I mean everyone in the movie is beautiful or handsome. Huppert, Ulliel, the seductive Astrid Berges-Frisbey, the charismatic Randal Douc. Does a film lose believability if its ensemble is too goodlooking?

Panh: I don't know if they're physically beautiful as much as they're beautiful for conveying something that's sincere. I think they are conveying something very deep and are in a state of grace. Physical beauty doesn't last. It doesn't remain. It's the performances that remain in your mind and that you continue to see.

Guillén: Fair enough. Certainly this is what I adore about Isabelle Huppert, who is pitch perfect in this role. The word I always use to describe her is "incandescent." She's a true "star" in the sense of possessing a distinct luminosity that radiates on-screen. Can you speak to your collaborative dynamic with her? What was it like to work with her?

Panh: First of all, Isabelle Huppert did not look anything like the mother who tended these fields. I wasn't interested in doing a historical re-creation of the novel. But I needed someone who could take the character further. Isabelle Huppert brings so much intelligence to a role and she also performs in a state of grace. It was those elements of intelligence and grace that I knew were very important to the story. We talked about the character. I didn't tell her to sit here, stand there, but through our conversations Isabelle knew her character very well.

Guillén: She lifts one eyebrow and you feel seventy-five conflicting emotions. She does so little and yet it registers so much. I loved the scene where she's wandering among the pregnant rice and pressing it against her skin. That was so beautiful and redolent. Did you direct her to perform this gesture or did it just come from within her character?

Panh: I cannot say that I directed her to do that. My role is to bring an actress to the place where she will do that on her own. I don't need to ask her to do it. I just create the space for her within which she can find her performance. That's why when I make a film I prefer to explore the location beforehand. I explore the set. In fact, in all my films the sets are not really sets. If I need a house, I build the house six months before, I landscape it myself, I watch the plants grow, and in this way I create a real ambiance, an atmosphere, in which my actors are not just contained by four walls.

Guillén: At film's end there's a postscript acknowledging that the film has been shot in the "Rice Fields of the White Woman." This lends Un Barrage contre le Pacifique an almost documentary feel. I know that Marguerite Duras' novel was actually based on her own childhood experiences, living with her mother, Madame Donnadieu, who did indeed administer a rice plantation that suffered floods from the sea. Are you saying you actually filmed on her plantation?

Panh: Yes. As with Marguerite Duras' novel, there are parts that are real and others that are fiction. We actually shot the film on the actual plots of land that the mother had purchased. That's where we made the film. I really wanted to go to the actual historical place and from there on go with the fiction, much the way Marguerite Duras writes in her novels. In fact, Madame Donnadieu's project was not such a utopia because nowadays in that actual field that she was trying to exploit, generations later the production in that rice field has doubled, tripled, over the rest of the neighboring fields.

Guillén: Finally, could you elaborate on the film's comment that rice has a soul?

Panh: I let the relationship between nature and human beings become the drama. It's an Asian mindset to say that rice has a soul. But if you look closely, everything has a soul. Trees have a soul. Rice has a soul.

Cross-published on Twitch. Scott Rosenberg's detailed interview with Rithy Panh regarding the Audiovisual Center Bophana can be found at Monsters & Critics.

TIFF08: Snijeg (Snow)—Q&A With Aida Begić

Aida Begić prefaces the director's notes to her first narrative feature Snijeg (Snow)—winner of the 2008 Cannes Critics' Week Grand Prize—with a quoted proverb: "Snow does not fall to cover the hill, but for every beast to leave its trail." I read that to mean that no matter what has befallen a people, it is their perseverance for survival—and for that survival to be witnessed and heard—that will mark their journey towards healing. Calamity is not meant to silence a people; but, to give their grief and their outrage a voice. The ethnic cleansing that befell Muslims (and Croats) by their Bosnian Serb neighbors remains one of the recent horrors of human history; the traumatic impact of which is still being felt by its widowed and orphaned survivors. That international audiences are willing to face these depressive events has been substantiated by the critical success of Danis Tanović's No Man's Land (winner of the 2001 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film) and Jasmila Žbanić's Grbavica (winner of the Golden Bear at the 2006 Berlinale). Forming a creative triad with her critically-lauded predecessors, Begić offers in Snow a compelling narrative of feminine resilience, domestic fortitude and compensatory magical realism.

At The Greencine Daily, Dave Hudson gathered together the critical response from Cannes08 and Emanuel Levy faithfully transcribed Begić's impassioned directorial statement. Whereas Variety dismissed Snow as a "polished but often tedious outing" that might leave some audiences cold, Howard Feinstein's appreciation for Screen Daily was decidedly more fair and accomodating. "Unobtrusively directed," Feinstein dispatched from Cannes, "this ensemble film successfully captures the special camaraderie among the survivors of such horror and the emotional and psychological toll it takes on the individuals." In his TIFF08 festival coverage for Eye Weekly, Jason Anderson praised Snow as "humanely wrought and sensitively rendered."

At the public screening I attended, Aida Begić was more than willing to unravel Snow's woven symbolism for her appreciative audience. Due to broken English and poor acoustics, this Q&A transcription has been modified for legibility. I was first out of the gate with the first question.

* * *

Could you speak to your creative decision to texture these painful historical events with poetic and magical realism?

When you are in very hard moments of your life, there must be a balance, there must be something that will keep you alive and that will ease your soul. Nowadays, life in my country is like that. We all live with a lot of problems which are connected to the material problems of our lives; but, still, we have spiritual levels that we are trying to keep. The physical aspects of our lives keep us down and force us to remain there in Bosnia and this is a real problem.

In doing research for the film, I spent a lot of time with village women who lost husbands and children. Unfortunately, about 10,000 men were killed in one day. I discovered that—despite this horror—these women are very jovial and strong people. I appreciate their strength, which inspired me. It's very normal and common in Bosnia for these people to live with an awareness of the metaphysical aspects of life.

Why Snow for a title? What is your meaning?

Snow is also connected to my answer to the first question. Snow is one of nature's most beautiful, incredible things. It's physical but also metaphysical.

Domestic life is beautifully represented in this film. What is your connection to the canning of plum preserves and the weaving of carpets?

I come from the city and don't have relatives in the villages so I had to do a lot of serious research to make this film. Likewise, my main actress—though Bosnian—grew up in New York. We both had to do research to make these actions believable. I have some memories of making jam when I was little; but, I didn't like to do it much. I liked eating it but I didn't like making it. But now I know that it's very hard to can preserves. As for the weaving of the carpets, it was amazing to discover that they are made with old things, old shirts, pieces of fabric that are woven into the carpets. I discovered a lot of things doing the research for this film.

Frequently in the film the main character Alma is shown walking down the street, knotting her scarf, similar to scenes of women in Iranian cinema. Were you influenced by Iranian cinema?

I guess yes. Just the beauty of their color and their landscape. Maybe it influenced me subconsciously.

Throughout the film there is strong preponderance of the color blue. Can you comment on that?

Blue is the color of the main character Alma. We developed the characters by helping them find their own colors.

One of the film's stated tragedies is the failure of these women to achieve closure, either not knowing if their husbands and children were dead or—if they knew they were dead—not knowing where their bodies were located. By film's end, it's revealed that the dead bodies of their men have been disposed in "The Blue Cave." Was this a common way to dispose of bodies?

Yes, unfortunately, there are a lot of mass graves in Bosnia. There's a terrible story about that. They first put bodies in so-called primary mass graves but then—when they started to be afraid that these mass graves would be discovered—they dug up the bodies, cut them apart, and re-buried the body parts in secondary mass graves, hoping to confuse anyone who might discover them. They didn't realize that all that's needed is a part of somebody's body to obtain DNA for tests which would help relatives identify, reclaim and properly bury the bodies. Bosnians hid the mass burials. Sometimes you would find them in caves. Sometimes you would find them in somebody's garden.

One of the elements of magical realism in the film is that the young boy's hair grows long overnight if he is frightened. What does this mean?

I had a friend who lived through the beginning of the war. When he was much younger, he had long hair and looked like a girl and that saved his life; but, he saw his father murdered. That inspired me to imagine a witness to murder whose hair would grow long to disguise him as female whenever he was afraid. That's why in the last scene the young boy finally has short hair, because he no longer has to hide.

Since the film is based on real people and real events, have they had to sell their homes and land?

Unfortunately, most of these villagers are not returning to their homelands in eastern Bosnia. The politics are still to keep them out and to keep a "clean" territory. The idea of people returning to their homes has not been completely successful, especially in these eastern territories. In other parts of Bosnia, some nationalities are returning to their homes; but, in the eastern part, it is still a big problem.

Cross-published on Twitch.

TIFF08—Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès): Q&A With Agnès Varda

As Piers Handling characterized Agnès Varda for her most recent film Les Plages d'Agnès (The Beaches of Agnès), which premiered at the 65th Venice International Film Festival and then continued to the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, Varda is irrepressible, enquiring, and an evident force of nature who even at the age of 80 shows no signs of slowing down. In her essayistic self-portrait documentary, Varda commences with the poetic assertion: "Si on ouvrait les gens, on trouverait des paysages. Moi, si on m'ouvrait, on trouverait des plages. [If you opened people up, you would find landscapes. If you opened me up, you would find beaches.]"

One day while on the beach in Noirmoutier, Varda realized how many other beaches had influenced her life and how these beaches could be used as the thread to connect her descriptions of family, friends, and career. Staging herself among excerpts of her films, images and reportages, profiling her beginnings as a stage photographer working under Vilar at the Festival d'Avignon and then as the official photographer for the Théâtre National Populaire, her early filmmaking as part of the Nouvelle Vague, her life with Jacques Demy, her feminism, her coverage of China in 1957, the Cuban Revolution in 1962, and the United States during the years of the Vietnam War, her life as an independent producer, and her family life, Varda has assembled a fascinating documentary; a wind-shifted mirror which creatively reflects her own fascinating personage. With generous candor, she responded to her TIFF08 audience about her latest creative endeavor.

* * *

Why the usage of mirrors in the film's opening sequence?

You know, it was easy to start with mirrors because the cliché of the self-portrait is to look at yourself in the mirror. I was helped by two things: first, the wind—which was a gift and made the scene for me because I could hide behind my scarf—and then all these mirrors that the kids helped me bring to the beach. By making an installation of mirrors on the beach, then it's not just the mirror in which I look at myself but mirrors that reflect the ocean and other people working with me. All these mirrors was how I wanted to make the portrait, split in many places and showing more people than me. I'm there a lot but I try to escape the mono-portrait to have other people surround me who become more important. I like the idea of digression, escaping the portrait, even though it was the subject.

Did the film change in focus from your initial concept to its eventual execution?

It's true that I did know exactly where I was going. What changed the direction of the film is that it took a long time to make—one year and a half. By doing it little by little, building it, my point of view changed. I wasn't shy at the beginning. I made it straightforward, more like a curriculum vitae in a way. Then I thought I should involve myself more—not too much in terms of saying things that people didn't normally know—but, being much more—how can I say?—part of the process, which came by chance all the time in the way I picked scenes from my films out of their context. I found images I had not found before. By just finding these images little by little, they would give me ideas.

Another thing that happened totally by chance was that—when I was invited to Los Angeles—in my room there was a man who was there to give me acupuncture or something and he kept staring at me so I thought, "I have to take him on the beach." Everything got built little by little and by chance, by opportunity, by things that I found, or people I met. I had to do it that way because I tried to make it become my life by making it. I would say I remembered why I live. I lived by remembering all these months. Along the way I had a wonderful crew of young people who were so enthusiastic about the film that it gave me patience, because the film was technically difficult. We had images of Super8 and 16mm films and digital material, we shot in HD and other sequences were not in HD, there was this mix of techniques which was difficult to put together while I tried to keep my daydreaming through which I could free associate. In France we have a game where we make a chain of vague inspirations, sometimes memories.

Also, one of the big inventions of life is to live with somebody, to make a couple, and that was part of my project: to show how a relationship has to go up and down with a wish of aging together, which also was a project that I couldn't finish and achieve. There was a kind of frustration in that one; but, I'm not a frustrated person, that's not my point, so I tried to keep alive what is life, I would say.

Why do you show your friend Chris Marker as an animated cat?

He decided one day that he didn't want to appear anyplace. Nobody can take pictures of him. He decided he wanted you to imagine him. At the openings of his films, the cat is at the theater. He made this choice and I like it. I like Marker very much.

Why the circus performers on the beach?

It was one of my daydreams. I love the circus. I love trapeze artists. I love them. Always in the circus, there is a background that is fabric or plastic or something and I thought, "Wouldn't it beautiful if we could watch them but also see the ocean?" We had to build a tower high enough to film them and the ocean. It was a big organization. It wasn't just like that. Even though I hope it looked like it just happened to be there and they just happened to be flying through the air. It's a daydream. When I was young, I wished to be in the circus.

And the house of cinema?

This house was made up of the reels of film from Les Créatures, in which Catherine Deneuve acted, and which was a failure. I had all these reels of film. When a film doesn't work, you have all these prints, big prints with seven reels, and as an act of gleaning I thought, "I should do something with these." It came into my mind that it would be beautiful to make a house of cinema made from cinema. It was a childhood feeling that it would be nice to live in a house which is cinema. So with Christopher Vallaux, the designer of my exhibition and my installation, we built the frame of the house and then we had the crew hang the strips of film so they would become walls. Were they not beautiful walls? Was it not a dream house?

Can you speak to your repeated usage of installation pieces throughout the film?

I've been starting to make installations. They give me great pleasure. You saw some of these installation pieces in the film. I think I am being drawn more to installations than film, or rather installations that include film. Maybe I will switch completely? I don't think so because I really like to film other people.

As a woman, how do you combine all your various lives as lover, mother, artist?

Please. Forever there has been this question. Combining means that you just decide that you do not want to give up the creation and the work; filmmaking in my case. I was a photographer already at the time that I decided to become a mother. I had to work. But I never quit the idea that I wanted to have a private life and a family. I just decided not to quit. All the women who work and are artistic, they have to make the decision not to quit anything. Sometimes you have to be a trapezist and an acrobat.

How have you maintained your creativity throughout the years?

I kept in a good mood. The desire to enjoy myself sometimes, I must say; but, the part I like the best in the film is when I put on the potato costume. I like to make a clown of myself. I've always liked it. I'm supposed to slow down, but I don't.

What was difficult about this film?

When it deals with things that are personal; the loss of somebody. It was like when I was editing Jacquot de Nantes, which was right after Jacques Demy had passed away. This film was 18 years after but the loss is still very strong, which has been difficult. To decide to make it that way. To try to find simple words and try to make it strong for me and—I hope—it goes through the audience and people can feel it. That was what I wanted to share. Also because many people I know, cinephiles, they love Jacques. Feeling something about somebody you knew is difficult.

Was it hard to know when the film was complete?

It's so difficult that I think I have to continue the editing because I'm not totally satisfied. When you have a story, you go with the story and try to make it understandable, or mysterious, and find an end. But this is like a free market and then you have to get it together to make a film. I think I would take things out. I need to have a sort of side film that I would like to finish with things more in digression, I don't know. It's so far in my mind that I'm not sure it's finished. But I had to stop somewhere to show it. It was just finished for Venice and then Toronto, these two festivals, and now I will go back for a little more editing I think.

So you will be editing the film some more?

I think the film is so clear, I said so much, I told so much, what could I add? But to answer your question, I will change something: the little addition of the birthday party really should come much earlier in the credits. I don't want to oblige people to stay for all these endless credits because we want to thank so many people. If I keep the birthday party, I will bring it near the beginning of the credits. This is a change I have to make.

You've been responding to questions about your film; but, do you have any questions about your film?

The answer would be yes. Are there some parts of the film that are boring to the audience? Sometimes I'm afraid that it's too long. They always tell you that you have to make a film that is only 100 minutes, that 100 minutes is the best, and that if it goes over 100 minutes it will become tiring, even though we know beautiful films are often long. I'm afraid to bore people. I always have the feeling that I should be careful. I don't know about some of the shots. When I made the shot of the naked people that started as a painting of the lovers by Magritte, I thought of that shot as being interesting and strong but then some people said that shot would make it difficult for the film to be shown in the United States [the male is shown with full frontal erection]. I don't know. The film has not been shown before a regular audience yet. It's only been shown to festival audiences. I want people to let me know what they think about the film, if it's too short, too long. I'm still questioning the film itself even though I've worked on it a long time. It's a quest for something and I've tried to find a balance between emotion and art, and between disorder and structure.

10/17/08 UPDATE: An abbreviated edit of this entry has just been published in movieScope 2:4.

Cross-published on Twitch.

PFA: Movie Love in the Sixties—Jean-Luc Godard

Yes, it's enjoyable to catch the new crop of films at the Toronto International, but an equal pleasure to return home just in time to take advantage of the Pacific Film Archive's affectionate retrospective—"Movie Love in the Sixties: Jean-Luc Godard"—with this evening's screening of Breathless. If Christ's death measures time as we know it; Breathless measures cinema as we know it. Though I've missed Band of Outsiders, Contempt, and Vivre sa vie, I'll be joyfully revisiting the trembling excitement of Breathless, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, A Woman Is A Woman, Masculine Feminine and Alphaville. September is back to school afterall.

PFA Publications Director Judy Bloch quotes a throwaway line of dialogue from Band of Outsiders—"Are you cold?" "No. I'm trembling with excitement."—to begin her preface to the Godard retrospective because she feels it "perfectly captures the romance of Godard's cinema of the 1960s, in which he broadened the convention of on-screen love to embrace a wide entrancing world: this was movie love."

She quotes Godard's own description of his Band of Outsiders mood: "Characters who live off the cuff . . . It is not the people who are important, but the atmosphere between them. Even when they are in close-up, life exists around them."

And she continues: "Even in the clinch it was not unusual to find Godard's camera wandering off to dwell on passersby, movie posters, cafe fronts, the life of the street at least as important and philosophically rich as the life of the individual. By the time of Two or Three Things I Know About Her, the 'her' in the title was not a woman at all, but Paris itself.

"Still, if Godard was the artist, his then wife Anna Karina was the model; together they explored the prism of her persona from every angle to look at love, or something like it, in a half-dozen films. Whether tentatively confident, as in Band of Outsiders; determinedly ambiguous, as in A Woman Is a Woman; or tragically self-knowing, as in Vivre sa vie, it is Karina who grounds Godard's notions about women in the real. Before Anna: Breathless. After Anna: Contempt."

Cross-published on Twitch.