For fairly obvious reasons of climate, outdoor cinema has never really caught on in the UK: cultural factors ensured that even drive-ins were always going to be something of a non-starter. And while for most people the whole moviegoing experience is all about being somewhere with dark, soundproofed walls and comfortably padded seats, anyone who has visited one of the many European film-festivals which run open-air screenings will verify there can be something transcendent and magical about watching a film under starry skies.

A case in point arrived during the opening night of this year's Kino Otok event - an agreeably rough-edged film-festival that's been held (since 2004) for a week in late May and early June, in the agreeably rough-edged surroundings of the Slovenian fishing town of Izola. In the local tongue 'Kino Otok' translates as 'Cinema Island', though the bilingual nature of the entire Slovenian coast (all 40km of it, formerly under Venetian then Italian control) means that it's also officially billed as Isola Cinema.

This year's Kino Otok (KO4) - as always, a refreshingly selective programme including only around two dozen features and a handful of shorts-programmes - paid generous tribute to one of the most revered cinematic maestros from Slovenia's big neighbour over to the west: Vittorio De Seta, born in the Sicilian capital of Palermo in 1923 and most emphatically not to to be confused with the very similar-sounding Neapolitan cine-celebrity Vittorio de Sica of Bicycle Thieves and Shoeshine fame. And while De Sica passed away in 1974, De Seta is still very much alive and kicking at the age of 83 - the festival's closing film was latest film, the heartfelt, admirably solid tale of illegal immigration, Letters From Sahara -  although a minor illness very sadly kept him away from Izola and basking in what would surely have been sustained and justified adulation.

At midnight on the opening night, the festival's open-air screen - erected in the town's compact, cosy, medieval Manzioli Square - showed De Seta's debut feature, and the film generally reckoned his masterpiece: 1960's Bandits In Orgosolo (aka Bandits of Orgosolo), on an immaculately-restored 35mm print which also featured in last year's London Film Festival.

This is an admirably tough, bracingly atmospheric tale set among the starkly picturesque hilly interior of Sardinia. The life of men and animals is implicitly a function of this landscape - and so, too, is De Seta's film (which must have been an absolute nightmare to shoot.) The story is Biblical in its simplicity - and its implacable harshness. A shepherd, tending his scraggly flock with his young brother for the purpose of cheese-making, becomes wanted by the thuggish local carabinieri after they mistakenly conclude he's part of a murderous bandit gang. This proves to be only the start of the hapless shepherd's woes as he suffers the vicissitudes of a particularly capricious Fate - a downward spiral which eventually reaches a stunningly bleak and piercingly ironic conclusion.  

In any setting, the film is something of a classic - but there was something rather spellbinding about seeing such an 'elemental' tale in such an 'elemental' setting, although Manzioli Square was, relatively speaking, a much warmer and less windswept locale than the movie shepherds' mistily mountainous haunts. And the most breathtaking grace-note of all came when reality and cinema combined for a few brief moments and a cloud on the screen matched up, pretty much exactly, with a cloud which happened to be passing overhead: with all due respect, that's something you seldom find at the ICA or the NFT...

There's one obvious downside to clouds, of course - and rain duly intervened on the second and third days, forcing the abandonment of the open-air screenings. But on the fourth and penultimate night of KO4 the skies cleared sufficiently for the programme to resume - coincidentally enough, the evening's schedule included five De Seta shorts from 1955, each of them shot on boldly-coloured CinemaScope, chronicling the lives of villagers and workers in rural Sicily, each of them a beguiling mix of the quotidian and the evocatively, spellbindingly bizarre.

As Martin Scorsese noted when introducing the shorts at the Tribeca Film Festival, "this was Sicily on the screen, the Sicily that my grandparents were the last in my family to know... A place where the light of day was so precious and the nights were totally dark and mysterious." Scorsese was the unlikely - and inadvertent - eminence grise of KO4, as his restoration programme (which has for several years now been engaged in valiant efforts to fight the loss of 35mm classics as the film-stocks decay) was also responsible for another little-seen gem from the archives, Haile Gerima's Harvest : 3000 Years from 1976.

Acknowledged as the Ethiopian movie, and one of the key works of African cinema, it begins as a seemingly conventional and predictable anthropological depiction of village life before quickly becoming something much more radical and interesting. This is an experimental feature, tough, abrasive and angrily polemical in nature, taking a startlingly uncompromised approach to the economic woes of mid-seventies Ethiopia. Given what was to unfold in the country over the next decade - the apocalytpic famine which propelled this area to the very forefront of the world's consciousness - the exploitation and mismanagement chronicled here take on a hideously prophetic air.

Retrospective material like Bandits and Harvest has always been a highlight of Kino Otok - and this year audiences were also able to catch an exceedingly rare glimpse of William Greaves' dazzlingly ahead-of-its-time post-modern jeu d'esprit which bears the unforgettable title Symbiopsychotaxiplasm - Take One, and is so headily redolent of the era in which it was made (1968-1971) that Izola crowds might have been forgiven for expecting to bump into Tito's Yugoslavian police on their exit from the theatre.

But the movie island isn't just about looking fondly back at marvels of the cinematic past: this year boasted a particularly strong selection of newer works (two of which, Travis Wilkerson's Who Killed Cock Robin? and Graham Robertson's Able Edwards, I must admit to selecting for the programme in my capacity as an [unpaid!] member of the Otok Advisory Board.) Perhaps the most unexpected and delightful new discovery was How Is Your Fish Today? by the Hackney-based polymath Xiaolu Guo, who came to Britain five years ago (from her native China) to study documentary-making. And though it was financed by a Channel 4 documentary fund How Is Your Fish Today? is only tangentially a documentary: this is a disarmingly post-modern, deconstructionist story about a would-be screenwriter struggling with his latest script.

Twin narratives unfold in tandem, one of them 'fictional', the other 'real', as the film oscillates between modes of storytelling, with some 'straight' documentary interviews of passers-by chucked in for good measure. Sounds like a potential recipe for arch clever-cleverness, but most resoundingly isn't: instead, this is a genuinely intelligent, poignant, wryly comic and - despite the seeming limitations of the low budget and the digital-video format - cinematic film which says an awful lot about both the creative process and the state of modern-day China (both urban and rural), works very nimbly on each of its multiple levels, and thus heralds the arrival of a striking new talent. Beijing's loss is, it's safe to say, Hackney's gain.

Neil Young

written for the next issue of TRIBUNE magazine



more Jigsaw Lounge coverage of Izola Film Festival 2007