Moroccan Festival Week. With its many sections and sidebar events, the festival underlined that Morocco’s capital city also wants to prove its cultural worth. Viera Langerova was less impressed by the international feature film competition this year while acknowledging that each festival presentation is the result of a cluster of conditions and possibilities.
Although the first place in the Moroccan film festival rankings belongs to Marrakesh, the film festival in Rabat is also a very well-known location and host. Its focus on ‘auteur’ film may be a bit of a classification conundrum, but the festival’s program was completed with a professional knowledge of all the standard sections evident, something expected by the audience, as well as filmmakers and film experts. The international feature film competition was followed by a competition of shorts, features, animation and documentaries, a focus on films from Quebec, Canada, feature-length documentaries and a selection of world cinema. There was also a Panorama of Moroccan Cinema and a section dedicated to children. In addition, there were held a number of master classes, panel discussions and round tables. The theme of one of them was particularly interesting – Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Arab Countries and in Morocco, Redefining cinema in the 21st century. Unfortunately, we learned that the discussion would be in Arabic, without translation. Master classes covered the work of music, actors, and one in particular focused on scriptwriting, and another from German-born Julia von Boehm, who lives in New York and is the stylist of stars such as Nicole Kidman, Uma Thurman and Christina Ricci. This master class attracted the attention of a primarily female audience.
A special place in the festival program belonged to Jordanian cinema whose latest hit Inshallah a Boy, directed by Amjad Al Rasheed, had already made a great circuit through the world festivals. The speech by Mohannad Al Bakri, director of Jordan’s RFC (Royal Film Commission), an organization that watches over the development of the local audiovisual industry, detailed the support of the importance of the presentation, and was followed by the film retrospective.
International Competition
Members of the FIPRESCI jury shared the selected film program with the main jury, chaired by the famous Filipino director Brillante Mendoza, who was accompanied by one of his actors. Upon his return, he will begin filming in Japan a new production, Chameleon, about a transgender Filipino woman, Maria, who, through her friendship with the rebellious daughter of a Japanese yakuza boss, Ai, gets caught up among gangsters.
The quality of the selected films did not impress the members of the two juries and almost all the main prizes went to the Mexican film Sujo, directed by the duo of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valdez. The story of the Mexican boy Sujo was co-produced by the USA and France. Sujo lost his father, a drug cartel member, as a child and is saved from a murderous squad by his aunt. He grows up in the backward countryside, in poverty and fear. When he reaches adulthood, he decides to flee to the city, earns a living in difficult conditions, and tries to study at the local university. A professor, who teaches there, helps him, as it is a problem to legalize his stay and prove he has at least a basic education. The directors have succeeded in creating an impressive atmosphere of anxiety and dark fatality, from which the boy tries to get out with admirable strength and determination. It’s a realistic portrait of the times and the people, struggling for a minimum of acceptable living conditions. The film also took the Best Screenplay award.
The award for the best male actor went to Lithuanian actor Valentin Novopolski for his role of Ihor Ilyas in Under the Grey Sky, the debut of the Polish-Belarusian director Mary Tamkovich. The story is inspired by the fate of the Belarusian journalist Kaciaryna Andreyeva. Together with her colleague Daria Chulcova, they were arrested because of a live broadcast of a protest against the murder of painter Raman Bondarenko by the security forces. Andreyeva was sentenced to eight years and the film’s trajectory follows the story of the couple. She tries to persuade her husband to leave Belarus, but he decides to stay, helping and supporting his wife despite harassment and police interrogations. The film details the process of persecution of opponents of the regime and has a strong political appeal.
The award for Best Actress was trickier, as there was the whole list of stars in Party of Fools, the film by French director Arnaud des Palliéres. The story is set in a women’s mental hospital in 1894, where Fanni arrives in search of her mother. Mélanie Thierry plays the main role, supported by Josiane Balasco and Caroline Bouquet. However, the jury decided to give award to an unknown actress, Fatma Sfarr, for her role of a mother in the Tunisian film Needle, directed by Abdelhamid Bouchnak. The long-awaited child is born as a hermaphrodite and the couple has three days to decide the child´s sex. The mother refuses and wants their daughter/son to be able to decide on her own. The film had visible professional shortcomings and was apparently made under modest financial conditions. Compared to the spectacular narrative of the French film and its female cast, its award was more, perhaps, about the encouragement and support of regional filmmaking.
The Audience Award went to the Italian film Taxi Monamour, directed by Ciro de Caro. It is a story about the relationship between two women, a local freethinker called Anna, and Nadia, a Ukrainian emigrant who stays in Rome with her relatives. Although this film also had a preferred lesbian theme, its realization did not arouse any enthusiasm, the script was characterized by free improvisation, and its meaning also flew into the air.
The answer to the question of how the local director Hicham Hajji’s Lost Princess won the Special Jury Prize was evidently somewhere deep backstage. The mysterious desert castle was once the scene of a tragedy and since that time it is the haunting place. It is guarded by Nassim and his daughter Nina, whose mother was the wife of an Arab sheikh. She was killed by his henchmen as an act of revenge and the whole story is revealed by newcomer Alec. He falls in love with Nina and their love is also put to the test in the whirl of dramatic events. The film cast had some surprises as, for example, Eric Roberts appeared in a mini-role and Nassim was played by the American actor Gary Dourdan, who also plays the investigator Warrick Brown in the TV series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (a.k.a CSI: Las Vegas)”. This patchwork, lacking any narrative structure or logic, was miles away from the proclaimed auteur cinema.
The Polish film Wet Monday (Easter Monday) by Justyna Mytnik, was also a disappointment. The main character, teenager Klara, is struggling to cope with a rape, finds no understanding from her sister, but is helped by her friend Diana. Everything takes place over the Easter holidays and the trauma is ornamentally illustrated by pagan rituals. The attempt to ‘exoticize’ the problem was unbearable and, simply said, deeply irritated the culturally compatible viewer. It would be very difficult to find any mitigating circumstances for this thematic confusion.
The rest of the competition’s portfolio faced the similar evaluations. Out of any comparable tracks with most Iranian films screened at film festivals was Girls of the Sea by Davoud Atyabi, whose main thematic accent here was concentrated on the smuggling of the girls, who themselves dream about a better life as they head to unknown and dark destinations. An Afghan woman called Goli has to escape her country to Iran because of the Taliban threat, and then fights for her life on the boat bringing the ‘human load’ to a certain and definitely not friendly sea port. There is not a minimum of probability in this film and its ultimate effect is of an amateur production.
The Indian film The Umesh Chronicles by Pooja Kaul, and about a young Radha from a well situated family and her relationship to servant boy Sundar, suffered from serious script mistakes which split its coherence. Similar confusion raised the rest of the choice; as in Tiger from the Dominican Republic, directed by José Maria Cabral, telling the story of the boy’s camp in the jungle where the young men should get the training of the surviving skills; likewise in Ru, from Quebec, Canada, directed by Charles-Olivier Michaud, where a Vietnamese girl tries to learn how to live in new and unfamiliar settings. Finally, the German-Spanish production Every You, Every Me (Alle die Du bist), by Michael Fetter Nathansky tells the story of the marital problems of Nadine and Paul, but the response was far from enthusiastic.
As heard from colleagues on the shorts jury, the quality of the films in that program had much higher evaluating points. This is the fate of festival harvesting, which depends every year on the whole cluster of conditions and possibilities, sometimes more, or sometimes less successful than before. However, finishing on a more complimentary note, the festival hospitality, organization and the good company of the festival crew, guests and fellow jury members was pleasing and flawless.
Viera Langerova
Edited by Steven Yates
© FIPRESCI 2024