The historic German city of Cottbus, an hour's autobahn south of Berlin near the Polish border, is known in Britain - if it's known at all - for the exploits of its professional football team Energie Cottbus, one of the very few sides from the former East to prosper in the upper reaches of the Bundesliga. But while Energie were relegated last season, the city's film festival goes from strength to strength, and November saw its 15th renewal.

The fact that it focusses exclusively on films from former Warsaw Pact areas may initially seem like a drawback - but the geographical area covered by this definition is so vast, and the film industries contained therein so varied and intriguing, that genial festival director Roland Rust and his team must have had a tricky job shoehorning all the worthwhile titles into just five days of screenings - six, including the "public day" at the end of the event in which the most popular titles twere given another airing.

As with the bigger - but not necessarily better - festivals up the road at Berlin or way, way down the road in Venice and Cannes, much attention at Cottbus was directed at the Competition Section. Ten films by first- and second-time directors competed for the 15,000 Euro main prize, with hefty cash sums also going to the runner-up and third-placed candidates. Film festival juries often come up with the most puzzling results, but this time they got it pretty much spot on - at least from this critic's perspective.

The 'Lubina' Award for best film went to Slovenia in the form of Jan Cvitkovic's warm, vibrant, all-human-life-is-here tale known in English as Gravehopping ('From Grave to Grave' is the literal translation of the original title Odgrobadogroba). Though not quite up to the superb standards of Cvitkovic's mid-length debut Bread and Milk from 2001, Gravehopping confirms him as one of the rising talents on the European cinema scene - it has also been awarded top prizes at the festivals in Warsaw, Turin, and is building a head of steam that might yet even propel it into a British cinema release (the film was also shown at the non-competitive London Film Festival).

The main focus is on Pero (Gregor Bakovic), a mournful-looking mid-thirties bloke who makes his living as a funeral orator. Set in Pero's (unnamed) village and extending its focus to include his family, friends and various interested onlookers, Gravehopping is a skilfully-textured rural chronicle of love, family, mortality and shattering violence, its cumulative appeal as dark, warm and enticing as a Slovenian summer's night.  

Cottbus's runner-up prize went to what was, for me, the second best film in competition: Ryna, the striking debut feature by 29-year-old Bucharest-born Ruxandra Zenide. Romanian cinema is enjoying a boom at present, with Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu being many expert's pick as the best film they saw at Cannes this year. But Ryna is, in its own quiet way, even more of an achievement. It's a delicate-but-tough coming-of-age tale set in a one-horse village on the mouth of the Danube Delta (in the wake of bird-flu, how nice to see this unique area presented in something approaching a positive light. Structured around a compelling central performance by Dorotheea Petre as the tomboyish, putupon 16-year-old heroine, Ryna is an austere but sensitive and soulful character-study of unusual teenager in an unusual locale - both looking great on Marius Panduru's camera.

Third place went to the most original and oddball competition entry, Alexey Fedorchenko's wonderfully deadpan sci-fi speculation First on the Moon. A faux-documentary about a (fictional) late-thirties Soviet space program, it assembles "archive" footage - most of it skilfully faked-up - and interviews with surviving "witnesses". Laugh-out-loud moments abound, including a superb 'film-within-the-film': a fictional late-30s Soviet space movie, including a brief but remarkable sequence involving stop-motion animation of Cosmonauts bouncing across the lunar surface.
  
But the undercurrent of propaganda-satire is deadly serious: the pseudo-proto-Cosmonauts suffer a range of grim fates, with the Gagarin-like hero Kharlamov (Vlasov) emerging a genuinely tragic figure thanks to a performance by newcomer Boris Vlasov which is, given the unique strictures in which he has to work, a feat almost as phenomenal as the imaginary moon-landing. 

These three titles were head-and-shoulders the pick of the competition - Jan Hryniak's deft thriller The Third from Poland wasn't without interest, not least for the audacity with which Hryniak 'hommages' one of the key works in his nation's cinema, Roman Polanski's debut Knife in the Water. Though far from perfect, it was decidedly preferable to the painfully pretentious Czech snoozer Something Like Happiness by Bohdam Slama, whose previous picture The Wild Bees somehow obtained top prize at a previous Cottbus Film Festival. Slama didn't go home empty-handed this time, unfortunately, as both the International Critics' Jury and the Audience Award ended up in his possession.

These prizes had nothing to do with the main competition jury, of course, whose taste proved so impeccable. And jury president Andreas Dresen - one of the most hotly-touted of the younger German directors - also presented his next feature, the delightful Summer In Berlin. The story of two Berlin best friends and their rollercoaster relationship over the course of one eventful summer - the English-language title, though bland, can't be faulted for accuracy - it looks likely to pop up in British arthouses sooner rather than later, and is very much worth seeking out.

The real find from Cottbus, however, was a gem tucked away in the 'Magyar Miracle' section of films from Hungary. Aron Gauder's savagely energetic animated feature The District! - in which the teenagers of a multicultural Budapest inner-city area band together to take on all-comers (including Tony Blair and George Bush!) would score a dark-horse Oscar shock over the relatively tame and pedestrian likes of Wallace and Gromit, Corpse Bride and Chicken Little. A nomination just wouldn't be enough. Jawdropping for both its technical virtuosity and its anything-goes subject-matter (drugs and sex abound, guaranteeing an 18 certificate in the UK), The District! is like a breezily postmodern hybrid of South Park and Ealing comedy (Passport to "Pest", perhaps?), with a post-modern dash of Romeo + Juliet... the Baz Luhrmann version rather than Shakespeare's, of course.

Neil Young
28th November 2005

written for the next issue of Tribune magazine

click here for Jigsaw Lounge's full coverage of the Cottbus Film Festival 2005