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Filmmakers representing Rumba
Zagreb Film Festival 2008By Rada Djurica In its sixth year, the young Zagreb Film Festival offered little treats to interest all political devotes of modern Croatia, left and right. This year, the festival closed with Oktavijan Miletic's film, Agram die Hauptstadt Kroatiens, a documentary film made during the Second World War during Nazi occupation, in Zagreb. The festival also screened the oldest preserved film made in Croatia, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (famed director of the 1922 film, Nosferatu), The Grand Duke's Finances, which was shot in Dubrovnik, Split and Rab in 1923. The special program at this year's festival featured My First Movie, Take Two by Stephen Lowenstein, in which the author interviews ten famous film directors about their first film. Lowenstein himself gave a presentation in the festival's press centre. In addition to seven days and 80 films, judged by the festival jury (Marit Kapla, director of the Goteborg Film Festival; Sejla Kameric, film director; and Nadine Luque, film producer) this year's program of features and shorts offered a selection of films from all over the world. The Golden Pram Award for Best Feature Film went to Rumba,
directed by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, because of
their original and distinctive cinematic voice. Of Rumba, the judges said: "Their use of choreography and
the characters' sheer physical presence on screen becomes a powerful
tool in telling this tale of how optimism can conquer the most tragic
events in life, distinguishing this light and colourful comedy. This
film is a great inspiration both for the audience and for filmmakers,
a demonstration of the possibilities of original storytelling." Rumba was also an entry in The International Critics' Week of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and has been praised as a truly original of modern cinema. This is an old-fashioned almost silent-film comedy reworked into a modern-day fairy tale. The protagonist hearkens back to such silent film greats as Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The Latino dance routines marry comic mime and agile body movements reminiscent of early Chaplin shorts. Some visual gags also recall the finesse of Jacques Tati and Mr. Bean. Anyone who likes old-fashioned mime would enjoy this film. It is set in an isolated Belgian community and opens with school teachers Dom and Fiona rehearsing for weeks to win a Latino dance contest. And there are here some hilarious scenes. A series of surreal gags turn what could be a sad film into a comedy. This is strictly visual material, with precise pop-art compositions; and with the help of minimalism and colorful designs, it reflects a modernist comic sensibility. The Best Short Feature Film Award for Best Short Fiction went to the film Cheese, directed by Huseyin Tabak, for: "Its simplicity and uniqueness with which it addresses the harrowing experience of war. There is a poignancy and humour which touches by highlighting the fragile balance of human existence and our instinct for survival. " It's a simple black-and-white story, intriguingly directed, about a
Kurd family stuck in the basement, hiding from bombs and a deadly end,
while waiting for Americans to come and rescue them. Special Mention-Full Length Film went to The Desert Within
by Rodrigo Plá, Rodrigo Plá's The Desert Within (Desierto Adentro) is a powerful tale about the obsessive pursuit of redemption. The movie has epic quality, in that it addresses, with dynamic intensity, the issues of faith and its intersection with mainstream morality. Plá brings a spiritual intensity to the film, leaving viewers with a sense of the power of deep faith. In the end, this ambitious work, this tragedy of Shakespearean proportion, Plá ends with the Nietzsche epigraph from which it draws its title: "The desert grows, and woe to him who conceals the desert within him." The Chinese documentary film The Red Race by Chao Gan won The
Golden Pram for the Best Documentary Film. The film tells the story
of very small children in China being cruelly and intensively trained
in gymnastics for questionable motives. The Golden Pram for the Best
Documentary Film was awarded to this unique, drama-packed documentary
for its overview of how one nation produces world gymnastics champions.
The film received praise for the director's compassion in displaying
the questionable methods that further the political aims of that nation. In the Croatian film competition, Kockice, Bad Day for Captain Cook
by Marin Juranic and Hana Vecek received the Golden Pram for The Best
Croatian Film. This was a short film about a little boy lost in a world
of imagination. The film walks the border between fiction and reality
in the day of a little boy, his mother, and his busy father, who is
barely present in their life. The little boy lives a life of imagination,
constantly craving his absent father. |
