A nun, a boxer, and a prostitute... No, not the set-up for a bawdy joke, rather the main characters in April In Love, Retrieval and London To Brighton, three of the most striking titles among the dozen features in competition at last month's Crossing Europe film festival in Linz, Austria. Wherever the geographical centre of Europe may be - and at various times villages in Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland and Belarus have all claimed the honour - said spot is certainly a heck of a distance from Austria's Danube-straddling third-largest city, capital of the Czech-bordering Oberösterreich province, home of the world's oldest cake-recipe (Linzertorte, a nutty/jammy confection dating from 1653), and former residence of luminaries such as A.Kepler, L.Wittgenstein, A.Bruckner, R.Tauber and, not that the locals will thank you for mentioning it, A.Hitler.

For a week in late April, however, Linz very much feels like the slap-bang centre of Europe's bullseye - at least in cinematic terms. This is when the 'Steel City' (equivalent in size and blue-collar provincial/industrial reputation to, say, Northampton) plays host to Crossing Europe, a lively, well-constructed film-festival inaugurated three years ago in the wake of Linz being named Europe's cultural capital for 2009. In the space of just four 'editions', CE has confounded skeptics who expressed sniffy concern about a festival comprising solely European movies, just at a time when the world was paying more and more attention to more far-flung 'hot spots' such as South Korea, Taiwan and Argentina.

The dozen titles selected for the festival's main competition proved to be of startlingly high standard - I was on the jury, and would have been happy for any one of six features to have walked off with the 10,000 Euro top prize. Though a strong admirer of Blighty's representative - admirably gritty, morally-complex underworld thriller London To Brighton (released here at the start of the year, and just out on DVD) - my personal pick was, narrowly, France's April In Love (original title Avril), the debut feature by 38-year-old writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu.

Though initially somewhat stark, dour and austere in its depiction of life in a remote rural nunnery, the film gradually reveals itself as a sly and delicious comedy as novice nun April (a lovely performance from rosy-cheeked Sophie Quinton) goes in search of her long-lost brother and discovers the delights and temptations of the world beyond the convent walls. The result is a sort of Buńuelian variation on Amelie - or perhaps a Lars Von Trier picture with the cruelty replaced by joyful innocence - pitched to appeal to believers and non-believers alike, and whose avoidance of mawkishness or sentimentality is, given the subject-matter, little short of miraculous...

The Linz public agreed, their votes enabling April In Love to snatch the Audience Award of 5,000 Euros. But my fellow jurors were harder to convince, and remained resistant to the film's ever-so-Gallic charms. Not that there was anything wrong with our eventual consensus choice, Pia Marais's The Unpolished (Die Unerzogenen), already mentioned on Tribune's pages during my report from January's Rotterdam Film Festival where the half-Swedish, half-South-African, Dutch-educated, German-resident Marais was one of four recipients of that event's top prize, the Tiger Award.

Like April In Love, The Unpolished is the story of a young woman who discovers that the grass really is much greener on the opposite side of the fence. Teenager Stevie (Ceci Schmitz-Chuh) has tired of her chaotic, perpetually on-the-run lifestyle, being yanked around Europe by her medium-time gangster parents. Stevie hankers for the kind of dull adolescence most girls of her age would give their left arm to escape, just one of the ironies in this closely-observed character-based drama - elevated considerably by Schmitz-Chuh's pitch-perfect central performance.

For me, however, acting honours at Linz - if such a prize had been within our gift - would have gone to a supporting player: Jacek Braciak from Slawomir Fabicki's Retrieval (Z odzysku). Braciak is an utterly compelling presence in the tough role of Gazda, an unassuming-looking, respectable-seeming family man who's actually a Machiavellian gangster at the centre of a sordid criminal web. Into Gazda's orbit comes the hapless Wojtek (Antoni Pawlicki), a 19-year-old boxer struggling to support his older, Ukrainian girlfriend and the latter's urchin-like child.

Though seemingly a decent sort of young lad, Wojtek finds himself in decidedly tricky ethical territory when he becomes an enforcer for loan-shark Gazda - and, despite initial financial gains, ends up much worse off than the most famous character who combined such activities with a ring career, Philadelphia's very own Rocky Balboa. Fabicki doesn't manage to entirely avoid either cliche or corniness as he relates Wojtek's downfall, but ultimately manages to craft a tough, bracingly dour parable about how easy it is for a man - and, by extension, a whole nation - to lose his moral compass.

My two remaining two 'prize-worthy' competition candidates were both by female directors - from Italy, Marina Spada's enigmatic anti-thriller As the Shadow (Come l'ombra), and from Hungary, Agnes Kocsis's likeably quirky dark comedy Fresh Air (Friss levegő). - and it's notable that women have won the top prize in each of Crossing Europe's four editions. Muddily-photographed to cast Milan in the most unappealing light, As the Shadow is for much of its length a conventional-seeming low-key romantic drama - focussing on a lovelorn thirtysomething travel-agent - which develops in ways the audience doesn't expect and can't predict. As the protagonist becomes obsessed with solving the disappearance of an acquaintance, the film becomes less about plot and more about mood, eventually eschewing the expected narrative closure in favour of something altogether more complex and elusive.

If As the Shadow is hampered by its fuzzy visuals, alluring cinematography is very much one of Fresh Air's trump cards. Stylised and carefully composed in terms of colour and framing, this is an unorthodox family chronicle in which a teenage daughter and her toilet-attendant mother rub each other up the wrong way in the confines of their cramped Budapest flat. The daughter (Izabella Hegyi has a wonderfully wary cast to her elfin features) is an aspiring fashion-designer - but is she fated to relive the disappointments of her similarly-creative mother? Potentially depressing subject-matter becomes a deadpan delight in Kocsis's hands - and while comparisons with Aki Kaurismaki are perhaps a touch premature, it's easy to see why her debut caused such a stir at Cannes last year...

My jury duties inevitably meant that I had to concentrate on the competition section, but I did find time to catch a couple of hors concours treats. It's very hard to keep up with all the young and youngish directors in Germany at the moment - not that many of them are distributed in the UK, sadly - but Thomas Arslan is certainly a name to watch. His Holidays (Ferien) manages to find new angles on those two overworked sub-genres, the marriage-breakup movie and the traumatic-family-get-together drama, and he shows notable skill in juggling half a dozen of characters in and around a well-heeled clan's rural retreat.

No Crossing Europe report, meanwhile, would be complete without a mention of a documentary - the festival has consistently championed non-fiction cinema, though for reasons unknown these are never included in the competition lineup. If it had been slotted in, local production Attwenger Adventure - which received its world premiere on opening night - might well have figured in our jury deliberations. It's an up-close-and-personal record of (and, it has to be said, tribute to) Oberösterreich's most popular musical export, folk-punk duo Attwenger.

Though invariably singing in their semi-impenetrable upper-Austrian dialect, drummer Markus and accordionist Hans-Peter have attracted acclaim far beyond their home turf - the late John Peel was a fan, and the band even recorded one of his legendary Sessions. Energetic and irresistibly good-humoured, Attwenger Adventure can be enjoyed even by those with no knowledge of the group or their milieu - and provides a timely reminder that, in modern-day Europe, it's the most uninhibited and undiluted cultural voices which can, paradoxically, have the most universal impact and appeal. Or rather, Hoids eing zaum es dauerd nimma laung!

Neil Young

written for the next issue of Tribune magazine



... full Jigsaw Lounge coverage of Crossing Europe 2007