by Vladan Petkovic
[Screen International Belgrade correspondent, here writing exclusively for Jigsaw Lounge]

Report #2 : MOTOVUN
Motovun Film Festival, Jul 23-27, 2007



The Magic Hill

Motovun, a hilltop medieval fortress in central Istria, Croatia, is well-known for its long history, wine, prosciutto ham, truffles, local spirits biska and medica, cheese... and one of the most interesting film-festivals in the world.

Conceived in 1999 by Croatian director Rajko Grlic* and two students of his informal summer "film school" - Boris T. Matic and Igor Mirkovic - the Motovun Film Festival (MFF) was not only a small revolution in what was, at the time, a ravaged Croatian cultural society, but also a representation of a political stance. The policies of the Croatian state were very nationalistically oriented. In an attempt to restore the "pride of the people", the government resented everything that came from the rest of the former Yugoslavia, instead blindly accepting so-called Western values.

By making a concept of the festival regional in the first place, and by bringing in films and film-makers from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and other Balkan countries, Grlic and company didn't quite it plant a fist in the face of the Croatian government, but perhaps raise a middle finger in the politicians' direction. Over the years it has managed to resist attacks from both "popular" and "elitist" cultural forces, gaining financing from both the Istrian authoritites and the national Ministry of Culture - although, unsurprisingly, the precise level of support has varies in accordance to the nature of the ruling political party.

You might call Motovun a film-festival descendant of Woodstock - organized by young people who have an incredible aptitude for the daunting task at hand. You can party all night if you so wish - although this may involve picking your way over, and through, drunken folk lying this way and that in the streets. You can watch films, hang out with friends, or, if you come alone (as I did on my first visit in 2004), quickly make a host of new pals. And all the time you feel strangely relaxed and elevated, even if you have serious work to do: last year I was on the Amnesty International jury, and never felt an ounce of pressure (perhaps the wine helped - the white malvazija, the red teran...)

The town of 600 inhabitants is visited every year by some 35,000 people, most of them under 25. The reason for this is the informal festival atmosphere, and the choice of films: from experimental narratives to music documentaries, plus a huge number of shorts, an on-line short competition, Asian and African productions, European and American indie fare. After four years attending Motovun, I cann't remember seeing anything more commercial than, say, Sarah Watt's Australian crowd-pleaser Look Both Ways (2005: 7/10), let alone anything resembling a mainstream Hollywood film.

Another attraction is the great musical side-programme, with concerts and parties running from 8pm to 4am. Even during the day, you will always find a couple of youngsters playing guitar and home-made percussion on the town's main square or in more secluded places, like the 'Bambus Bar' where parties are held at night and people who don't have accommodation in town (or in the campsite below) sleep on thegrass or on large cushions provided by the festival.

The screenings run almost 24/7, with diurnal projections held in two small cinemas on the square, and nocturnal ones on two open-air venues. One special treat is the particularly youth-oriented late-night programme, with screenings starting at 1.30am at Barbacan, an extended part of the fortess hanging over a high cliff (in olden times, used as a look-out post by troops watchful for one of the hundreds of armies that occupied Istria throughout the centuries.)

This year the programme was dedicated to Japanese horror, showing Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (1997); Takeshi Miike's Audition (2000; 9/10), Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast (Moju) (1969); Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo - The Iron Man (1989; 8/10) and the highlight of the festival: Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1926 avant-garde A Page Of Madness [see full review below].

As for the competition programmes (actually the least important thing at Motovun, but perhaps of greatest interest for internatiomal readers)), the festival's main award is the 'Propeller of Motovun'. This year it went to Israeli-German-Japanese co-production Sweet Mud (Adama Meshuga'at) by Dror Shaul. My rating for the film would be  5/10 - and I have no idea why the jury, including Istvan Szabo, and directors such as Serbia's Misa Radivojevic, Croatia's Ognjen Svilicic and Albania's Kujtim Csasku, chose it.

Bulgarian Andrey Paounov's The Mosquito Problem And Other Stories (Problemat S Komarite I Drugi Istorii) won The "A to A" award, for films from the region comprising Albania to Austria. David McKenzie's Hallam Foe took the FIPRESCI award, the audience voted for Croatian Play Me A Love Song (Pjevajte Nesto Ljubavno) (5/10), and The Amnesty International Human Rights Award went to Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's Dry Season (Daratt) (8/10).



Motovun is a place with its own special type of incredible energy - and I speak as somebody who has visited the town on a couple of occasions when the festival wasn't taking place. Theories about this 'energy' are numerous: the position of undergound waters below the fortress, perhaps, or the influence of certain mythological Istrian entities such as giants, fairies and the local version of vampires.

But Motovun during the festival is something else again - encountering 35,000 visibly happy people, many of them at least half-drunk, can only be a joyful experience. The atmosphere transfers itself to the screenings also - even when the audience sits in rapt, attentive silence, as through the screening of A Page of Madness. Then there was Audition, where the assembled throng was a mix of Miike fanatics - who were there to watch the movie for the umpteenth time, at 1.30am on a cold and windy night - and those who literally had no idea what they were about to see - if they 'saw' much through their haze of alcohol and marijuana, that is...

Vladan Petkovic

August 2007

* Perhaps now best known for 2006's Border Post, Grlic was a member of the famous generation of Yugoslav students at Prague's FAMU academy, along with Lordan Zafranovic, Goran Markovic, Zelimir Zilnik, Srdjan Karanovic, Goran Paskaljevic and Emir Kusturica.

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A PAGE OF MADNESS
Kurutta Ippeiji : KINUGASA Teinosuke : Japan : 1927 : 78min : [9/10]



Seen at Motovun Film Festival, July 24th 2007

As Japanese avant-garde theatre, painting and literature in the 1920s were considered the highest forms of art - and developing rapidly - cinema was regarded as a lower form. This was partly due to the highly-developed industry producing mostly samurai films with several long fight-scenes, or else theatrically-derived Kabuki adaptations and jidai-geki period swashbucklers. The first Japanese director to attempt a different approach in both subject-matter and newly-available technical devices was Kinugasa Teinosuke, with the 1926 master-piece A Page Of Madness.

This was already his 35th film, and Kinugasa was, at the beginning of the decade, becoming increasingly familiarized with developments in European cinema, impressionism, surrealism, and Soviet theories of associative montage. As no Japanese production studio was interested in financing his project, he produced it himself - but he shot it a studio, for which he also had to empty his own pockets.

Most Western theorists and critics cite Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari as the biggest influence on the film, in that it treats madness as prime subject. But A Page Of Madness handles the theme in a completely different way, both in terms of story-development and mood. If one is looking to find a counterpart in European silent film, then it would probably be Murnau's The Last Laugh - released in Tokyo in 1926 - and cited by Kinugasa as his favourite film. The two works shares several similar elements, although in Kinugasa they are combined and integrated in a different structure.

Based on a treatment by the (1968) Nobel Prize winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), A Page Of Madness is not only a tour-de-force of visually striking and disturbing images, but also a film with narrative and subject matter which would later become the landmarks of the J-Horror sub-genre.

A retired mariner (Inoue Masui) abandons his wife (Nakagawa Yoshie). She drowns their child and then goes mad. He feels responsible, so he finds a job in the mental asylum where the wife has been committed. Having little trust in the treatment she is receiving, he plans their escape.

A Page of Madness presents a stunning view of the world as seen by the mentally ill - from the rapid montage of the opening storm sequences; to the surrealistic images of the sailor's wife dressed in an exotic costume dancing in front of art-deco backdrops; to the closing sequence of the sailor putting Noh masks on the faces of inmates, and then onto his wife's, and his own. As Swiss film-historian - and specialist in Japanese silent cinema - Mariann Lewinsky wrote, "The sequence is his fantasy of being able to overcome the mental separation from his wife, and to bring the deranged inmates deliverance from suffering. It functions, as intended by the authors, indeed as an imagined happy ending."

A Page of Madness retains the power to knocks the viewer over, using every technique known to filmmakers of the time, placed at the service of a radically subverted and startlingly innovate narrative development.

As 99% of the 1920's Japanese films were lost, first in the 1923 earthquake which destroyed the Nikkatsu depot in Tokyo, and then later during the Pacific War, A Page Of Madness was an exception because the director kept both the positive and the negative in his house (the film never having been a studio product.) Kinugasa originally thought his film had also been lost, until he stumbled upon it in 1971 in his garden shed.

It has since been restored twice, and the last restoration took place this year. Motovun audiences had the wonderful opportunity to see this latest version "the way it should be seen"- with the accompaniment of the silent film narrator - a role properly known as the benshi - Kataoka Ichiri, of Matsuda Film Production, a company which specialises in archiving and screening Japanese silent features. Alongside with the benshi, German silent-film pianist and composer Gerhard Gruber provided the musical accompaniment for the film.

A benshi comes from the long tradition of Japanese silent cinema - those films never included intertitles, instead a narrator who spoke the dialogue, made comments and some lyrical discourses, even providing sound effects such as roar of an engine or thumping of a heartbeat.

A benshi is actually one of the stars star of the film and Kataoka wrote the script himself based on the original treatment. Kataoka and Gruber have obviously pinned the movie down perfectly, and as the benshi spoke in Japanese, Croatian subtitles (projected directly and manually from a computer) went remarkably well. It's a shame there were no English subtitles, which meant that a part of the audience left after stoically persisting for half an hour.

Vladan Petkovic
August 2007

previously : Vladan's report from Novi Sad