A Cock and Istanbul Story By Anita Piotrowska

The program of the international section of the 25th Istanbul Film Festival tried to embrace a broad variety of films “crossing the bridge” between East and West, fiction and documentary, personal or metaphysical approach and films engaged in the most essential issues of contemporary life. Among eleven titles we could see films from Iran to France, from Great Britain to China, including such different genres as literary adaptation, documentary, thriller, comedy or drama. However, there were only a few genuinely original films.

The winner of the FIPRESCI prize and main jury prize A Cock and Bull Story by Michael Winterbottom, screened at the very beginning of the festival, established a level that was difficult to exceed or even reach for the rest of the titles presented in the competition. The only film that could have been considered as equally challenging and mature was Christoffer Boé’s Allegro, an intriguing mixture of science fiction and metaphysical thriller. Drawing from Andrei Tarkovski’s movies, Boé tells of a journey to a mysterious “zone” set in contemporary Copenhagen where the peoples’ memories are hidden.

Unfortunately, Tarkovski’s figure may also be a curse for young ambitious filmmakers. The Iranian Portrait of a Lady Far Away (Sima — ye zani der doordast) by Ali Mossaffa, a sophisticated story of two strangers drifting together through the night, seems to be a good example of this tendency — and the lost innocence of Iranian cinema as well. The emotionally engaging Backstage by French director Emmanuelle Bercot (the story of a pathological relationship between a teenager and her pop star idol) may also resemble such masters of psychological games as Rainer Werner Fassbinder (e.g. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), but regrettably suffers from a lack of the intensity and fascinating ambiguity of the German filmmaker. Sometimes following the masters may be a real virtue, after all. Rashid Masharawi’s Waiting (Intizar), the interesting French-Palestinian drama on the casting of actors for the National Palestinian Theatre, could have been much more impressive if the director had followed in the tracks of Abbas Kiarostami or Mohsen Makhmalbaf who can brilliantly play with fiction and reality in their films – or if he had worked out his own alternative method.

Watching Istanbul’s selection of foreign films, it was certainly difficult to define the criteria on which it was based. Sometimes the viewer may be disappointed with the fact that the program of a really prestigious festival includes such conventional titles like Don’t Tell (La bestia nel cuore) by Cristina Comencini. The fact that the Italian film was one of the Academy Award nominees this year (in the category of the Best Foreign Language Film) was undoubtedly a strong argument for the festival programmers. But for the cinephiles who make up the majority of the festival audience this otherwise decent film was too predictable. There was a similar problem s with Separate Lies by Julian Fellowes. The film, made in style of television drama, is a very remote echo of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (it was Fellowes who had written the Oscar-winning script). Focusing on these two titles one may come to the conclusion that a well-known name and awards received are more important than the film itself.

Generally speaking, the films of the international competition were interesting and worth seeing, although the program didn’t abound with masterpieces nor artistic discoveries. That’s why the verdict of the FIPRESCI jury may be perceived as an obvious one, since Michael Winterbottom has a lot of good films to his name. Nevertheless, his adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s novel turned out to be an extremely fresh and bold movie. In comparison to it other titles like the Chinese Little Red Flowers (Kan shang qu hen mei) by Zhang Yuan, the story of an urban kindergarten serving as an universal metaphor of conformism, or the Czech film A Little Piece of Heaven (Kousek nebe) by Petr Nikolaev, conventional and funny love story set in the severe regime of communistic Czechoslovakia, were rather old-fashioned. On the other hand, Christian Frei’s The Giant Buddhas, the exciting documentary essay on religious fundamentalism, seemed too flamboyant.