Neil Young's Film Lounge

COLOSSAL YOUTH : the 9th NUFF, Tromsø

“To me the great hope”, Francis Ford Coppola famously said some 20 years ago, “is that… suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, and you know, and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camcorder and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will become an art form.”

Two decades on, the presence of Transformers 3 and Pirates 4 in the world’s multiplexes would suggest cinema still has some way to go before it becomes “an art form.” But the underlying thesis behind Coppola’s prediction – which was motivated by the arrival and increased availability of cheaper, lighter, better cameras – has been borne out: and thanks to mobile phones most adults in the developed world now carry basic film-making tools in their pocket.

An entire generation has grown up taking for granted the idea of making – and distributing – moving images, and it’s surely no coincidence that recent years have seen the advent of the “teen auteur”: Xavier Dolan had two features in the official selection at Cannes (I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats) by the age of 21; Samira Makhmalbaf won the festival’s Jury Prize aged 19 with Blackboards (2001) while sister Hana was 14 when she made the documentary Joy of Madness (2003).

Of course, film has always been an unusually “all-aged” medium: Manoel De Oliveira made his first documentary aged 23 in 1931, and 80 years later the centenarian is preparing his next feature. Orson Welles was 25 when he made Citizen Kane; Jean Vigo 24 at the time of À propos de Nice, while Britain’s Michael Reeves completed three full features – including the classic Witchfinder General - before his death aged 25 in 1969.

25 also happens to be the cut-off point for the Nordic Youth Film Festival (Nordisk Ungdoms Film Festival, or NUFF), held each June in the world’s most northerly city – Tromsø in Norway – and organised under the auspices of youth-centre Tvibit. I ventured north to the land of the midnight sun for this year’s NUFF – the 9th – as an international-competition juror, and was very pleasantly surprised by the range and quality of the offerings on show in the venerably august surroundings of 96-year-old Verdensteatret (“the world’s theatre”).

NUFF’s guiding philosophy is that “youth film” deserves respect as a valid art-form in its own right, and isn’t just about the creation of “calling-cards” made with a view to future careers in the business. And there’s often a disarming freshness, directness and audacity about films from the 15-25 age-group which the event showcases – no shortage of rough diamonds, and some strikingly polished gems.

Indeed, two of the international-section contenders so distinguished they’d warrant inclusion in any international film-festival. Our main prize-winner was Portugal’s Humiliated and Offended by Dany Horiuchi and Salvador Palma, atmospherically shot (on 16mm) by Gil Alves – which magically compresses a feature-film’s scope into 18 brisk minutes.
Echoing Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 L’Avventura, it follows an elderly Alzheimer’s sufferer wandering disorientedly around an underpopulated city – and out into the countryside – while his distraught, squabbling relatives engage in an increasingly desperate search.

Brusque, bleak and elliptical, Humiliated and Offended is at once grittily specific and intriguingly universal in its implications: it’s clearly not just this one man and family who’ve lost their way, and the short can also be read as an oblique fable on Portugal’s current plight.
Regardless of its financial woes, the country is punching far above its weight in film-making terms: as well as the miraculous De Oliveira, there’s world cinephilia’s most revered auteur, Pedro Costa (Colossal Youth). Among younger generations, Gabriel Abrantes and João Salaviza (both b.1984) have already obtained international acclaim – and that pair will surely soon be joined by Horiuchi (1988) and Palma.

Austria is another “small” European nation which – thanks to generous arts-sector funding – is always worth watching in terms of new cinematic talent, especially avant-garde risk-takers. But while Ora et Labora (the Benedictine motto, “Pray and Work”) was billed in the NUFF programme as “experimental”, director Aaron Arens (also 1988) is clearly more engaged with conventional narrative forms than his illustrious, formally-challenging countrymen Peter Tscherkassky and the late Kurt Kren.

Entirely set in a dusty, stuffy apartment, it stars veteran Florentín Groll as a chain-smoking, whisky-sipping codger who spends his days watching television. But this is no sedentary activity, as the mumbling, grumbling protagonist is revealed as possessing sinister, perhaps even divine powers… Told with the economic, twist-in-the-tail circularity that marks outstanding shorts Ora et Labora is a clever, darkly humorous miniature which yields further pleasures via multiple re-watching.

Other NUFF 2011 notables include Ukraine’s Olena Maksymenko, 25 (jagged, unnerving documentary The Most Secretly Depth of Your Skin); Norway-based Guatemalan Elisa Pirir Ruiz, 20 (haunting, semi-animated love-story Hugin and Munin); Palestine’s Asma Ghanem, 20 (irresistibly jaunty 42-second animation How Salma Fly); Sweden’s Victor Lindgren, 25 (Nordic-section prizewinner for the atmospheric Where Were You?); South Africa’s Kimeshree Munsamy, 24 (rousing documentary We Grow Together), the plus local 20-year-olds Jardar Solli (Learner, a tense and mature study of intergenerational domestic abuse) and Emilie Blichfeldt (Theory of Colour - a wordlessly eloquent example of sci-fi dystopia.)

And NUFF’s about much more than just directors. On this evidence, Scandinavian cinematography is set for a particularly golden spell, thanks to the likes of Sweden’s Martin Gärdemalm (Where Were You), Finland’s Toni Haaranen (Place to Stay), and Norway’s Benjamin Mosli (Under the Wing and Tales of the West), Even Grimsgaard (Learner) and Christian Caspersen (Theory of Colour) – the latter also deserving extra credit for his behind-the-scenes role as NUFF’s “festival producer” for the last two years.

2012 will mark NUFF’s 10th edition, and as well as being an admirable institution in its own right – the festival has week-long workshops in which young people from many corners of the world are invited to participate, in an informal atmosphere of encouragement and unfussy international co-operation – it’s an encouraging example of what can be achieved on quite limited resources at a time when film-festivals of all stripes are feeling such a severe financial pinch.

Neil Young
28th June, 2011
written for the 7th July edition of Tribune magazine