| 2007 Tromsų Film Festival : index page / 'Tribune' roundup |
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| Saturday, 27 January 2007 | |
 Seen Tuesday 16th January Tonite Let's All Make Love In London (1967) [8/10] Wednesday 17th Winterland [6/10] Still Life [6/10] Empty [5/10] The Violin [7/10] Thursday 18th Emma's Bliss [6/10] The Paper Will Be Blue [4/10] White City [5/10] aka Frozen City All the President's Men (1976) [9/10] Friday 19th Born and Bred [6/10] Relations [6/10] Border Post [7/10] Restart [2/10] Saturday 20th The Cats of Mirikitani [6/10] Sunday 21st Not Here To Be Loved [7/10] Chronicle of an Escape [4/10] aka Buenos Aires 1977  FULL DISCLOSURE : Since 2005 Neil Young has been, along with Henning Rosenlund and Nina Mathisen, one of three "Program Consultants" for the Tromsų International Film Festival. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WAITING FOR THE SUN : an exclusive report from the 2007 Tromso Film Festival (for Tribune magazine) Located 350km north of the Arctic Circle on an island off the Norwegian mainland, the Tromsų International Film Festival (TIFF) - which marked its 17th renewal in January of this year - lays claim to be the northernmost event of its type. There is actually a much smaller film festival in one of the towns further north, but Tromsų is certainly as far north as most denizens of the international film-festival circuit ever stray: the sun remains below the horizon from November until January, and was first observed peeking over the Lyngen alps on the morning of TIFF's final Sunday. Superlatives in this part of the world are often a matter of debate: Tromsų has the world's northernmost brewery of any significant size (again, there is a tiny microbrewery a little further north), and it's unlikely you'll find another mosque, university or top-flight football-team any nearer the North Pole. But regardless of whether or not TIFF actually is the world most northerly film-festival - and it is, to be fair, a rather academic question - those who've visited it don't hesitate to rank it among the world's nicest, cosiest and most welcoming. And in terms of attendance (46,000+ tickets sold this year) compared to the population of its host city (63,000), Tromsų's is a remarkable success story. But what of the films themselves? Full disclosure: since serving on the press-jury at TIFF 2004 I've been a semi-informal "programming consultant", so had already seen and recommended several of what I'd call TIFF 2007's highlights - including Bill Daniel's Who Is Bozo Texino? and YING Liang's Taking Father Home (both previously covered in these pages). Wearing my impartial "critics' hat", however, I managed to catch a total of 16 films at the festival - 14 "new" titles (i.e. from 2006 or 2005), plus two classics from the archives. Perhaps predictably, these "vintage" movies proved the most entertaining and accomplished of the bunch. I had long been familiar with Alan J Pakula's All The President's Men from 1976 - showing as part of the festival's sponsorship by the cable channel Turner Classic Movies - but I'd never managed to catch a 35mm print on the big screen before. Being able to do so in the unique surroundings of Verdensteatret ("The World's Theatre") - Scandinavia's oldest purpose-built cinema - was a world away from late-night BBC screenings I'd been used to. Though often somehow taken for granted as a product of its post-Watergate/pre-Bicentennial era, the film has lost none of its power three decades on and remains perhaps the most persuasive (and, it must be said, hagiographic) portrayals of investigative journalism in action. Rather less well-known was another Verdensteatret-shown title, Peter Whitehead's riotously atmsopheric, deliriously rough-edged chronicle of the "swinging sixties", Tonite Let's All Make Love In London (1967). Still miraculously fresh after all these years, the 70-minute film combines hand-held travelogue-style footage of the city's sights and streets with up-close-and-personal interviewsm in which the likes of Michael Caine, Julie Christie and - best value of all - David Hockney sound off about the issues of the day. It's part of a globetrotting retrospective-cum-tribute to Whitehead - one of the more enigmatic and maudit of post-war British cinema personalities - which has been lovingly curated by tireless film-historian Paul Cronin (his distinctively lanky frame standing out even among the tall Norwegians resident in this invigorating outpost). Among the newer titles, three films in particular stood out. From Mexico: Francesco Vargas Quevedo's The Violin, an admirably unsentimental Hispanic, monochrome variant on Roman Polanski's The Pianist, featuring a Cannes-award-winning debut performance from octogenarian thesp Don Angel Tavira as an aged, one-handed violinist who ends up rather awkwardly "befriending" the seemingly brutal commander of the military forces occupying his village. A tough little tale set in an unspecified Latin American nation wracked by civil war, The Violin manages to discover new melodies from what initially seems unpromisingly hackneyed material. It's the kind of movingly accessible, perfectly-nuanced fare which should in theory play very well in British arthouses, but which all too often remains a hidden gem known only to denizens of the film-festival circuit. It usually doesn't take much for a French film, however, to obtain UK distribution: which makes the non-appearance on our screens of Not Here To Be Loved all the more baffling, nearly two years after its world premiere. A wonderfully economic tale of middle-aged regret and ennui redeemed by the unexpected possibility of romance, it features two outstanding central performances from Patrick Chesnais and Anne Consigny as a mismatched couple brought together by a tango-dancing class. With minimal dialogue and an awful lot of significant looks and pauses, Brize skilfully choreographs a dryly deadpan fable that's about as glum as a film can be while still qualifying as a comedy: much of the joy resides in observing how deftly the direction and script navigates its way down that particularly tricky line. The third "find" of Tromsų was another comedy, albeit one of a rather different hue. Border Post is a co-production between Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Macedonia - and the UK. It's the first time that the ex-Yugoslav countries have collaborated on such a project, and as such is itself cause for interest and celebration: especially as the film itself, a drama/romance/black-comedy set on the spectacular shores of Macedonia's Lake Ohrid in 1987, takes place just before Yugoslavia started its slide into civil war(s). Writer-director Rajko Grlic impressively shifts his picture's tone - from the M*A*S*H-style khaki-knockabout of the early sections, through to more romantic and tragic moods in the middle and later sections. This life's-rich-tapestry approach is at once utterly 'Balkan' and yet, thanks to the terrific performances across the board, utterly universal. And the knowledge of the impending Yugoslav cataclysm adds an extra element of poignancy and irony to even the breeziest and most carefree of moments. Also worth a look if coming to a town near you: TIFF opener Winterland, a charming if somewhat slight romantic comedy about Kurdish refugees in northern Norway; JIA Zhang-Ke's Venice Film Festival Prize-winner Still Life (intriguing, though not a patch on YING's thematically and geographically similar Taking Father Home); quirkily downbeat German rural comedy Emma's Bliss; grief-laden Argentinian tale Born and Bred; deceptively small-scale Russian infidelity drama Relations, plus crowdpleasing American documentary The Cats of Mirikitani. All in all, a rewarding selection of films that more than justified the long journey into the land of the Northern Lights. Neil Young |
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