(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I'm at the Venice Film Festival Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica. A movie is done, people clap, but the five behind me in the hall bow. We had seen 68 Venice, about the revolt against the festival exactly 40 years ago: The main message was "Set the festival free!". In 1968, filmmakers demand autonomy based on purely artistic considerations. The protests mean that the opening is postponed for 48 hours. Authorities arrest the protesters, police in Mussolini-inspired uniforms attack with clubs. Still, there is plenty of life in the camp, appeals are kept, slogans are raised high. And there, director Pier Paolo Pasolini stands and shouts debatingly to the other filmmakers. He himself was in doubt for a long time, but ended up withdrawing the film Teorema from the program. What this film guru did had great significance.
But why did the Italians bow behind me? I grab them and follow them for a glass of white wine with campari – which you drink here in Venice. Yes, why did they actually protest in 1968? It was not easy to understand from the film. Exactly, my Italian friends point out. They call the film propaganda, and accuse it of trivializing the old left. Until 1968, the festival had been a festival for the upper and middle class – with personal invitations, expensive clothes and price festivities. Then came 1968 in Paris and Cannes. Now the younger filmmakers wanted something different.
Loud bending
If you read what Tullio Kezich says in the catalog about the said film, the tone is quite negative. For the uprising, the festival weakened the following decade – Cannes took over. As Luis Malle summed up many years later, the uprising made the festival a minor event. Festival director Luigi Chiarini resigned, but according to Kezich he was not one of the worst, but open to "artistic rigor, new features and community involvement". The uprising is described in the catalog as "a" carnivalization "of the serious uprising in Cannes three months earlier." The film interviews a part that does not even remember what they protested against. Italian Roberto Rosselini disagrees with the uprising, while German Alexander Kluge states that "films must compete".
So why arc so loud? My philosophically educated friends do not snore for the sake of the sport, do they? Tommaso tells me that in 1968 they had prepared a program that does not appear in the film. Francesca points out how easy it is to cut interviews to get the answers you want. Which also came out in a very negative newspaper coverage of the film the next day. The film was made by Antonello Sarno and Stefano Della Casa – men who allegedly take assignments from Berlosconi's people.
Pasolini and others understood what was wanted in Paris and Cannes: Radical programs that demanded that quality films also be available to people who could not afford tickets. They protested against star worship, glamor, stupidity, against films that did not take the cinematic seriously.
Get American movies
Although the festival almost collapsed when the Berlusconi group tried to take control of the festival a few years ago, it is today – in its 65th year – really high and varied enough for any film lover. The existential upsetting goodies exist. The engaged social films as well. There is plenty of room for the documentary and political films.
Today's festival director Marco Müller (55) has managed to bring in a world premiere of most festival films. In his catalog preface, he asks what will take us to new territories. He emphasizes that as long as the passion for the new has not yet disappeared in the West, we will constantly get new "signatures", new authors who especially treat themselves to the "luxury of being" outdated "and at the same time be aware that the future is changing. art."
Of the 21 films in the competition itself, only five are American this year, due to the strike among screenwriters. Let me mention that cinema in general in Italy consists of 60 percent American, 30 percent Italian and barely ten percent international films – the latter is halved in four years. Among the American festival films we find the dysfunctional family drama Rachel getting Married by Jonathan Demme; Kathryn Bigelow's war thriller The Hurt Locker about elite soldiers disarming mines in ongoing war zones; and the Cohen brothers' film Burn After Reading. Philippine Francis Xavier Passion's film Jay and Iranian Amir Naderis Vegas: Based on a True Story is media criticism at its best. The former tells how television does not shy away from any means of placing the camera in the middle of private tragedies, the latter is about greed and gambling over human destinies.
But most of all: the program Orizonti (Horizons), which is described by Müller as a seismographer who records the first selves with his sensitive show, presents films from various stages of development spread from all over the world. This is where the socially critical politically inspired films and documentaries are shown.
Street children and remorse
Puisque nous sommes nés (Because we were born) is from Brazil, Pernambouc. We follow two poor half-brothers who fight to earn a living and keep crime, begging and drugs at bay. They take all sorts of shit jobs, hang around a gas station by an endless highway and just want to get away: "I have nothing, just my life," says one of the boys. The applause in the hall was enormous.
In Machan by Uberto Pasolini, we see Sri Lanka's poor men's dream of working in the West. The fiction film is based on a true story where 22 men get a visa by pretending to be a handball team, and thus they get an invitation to a tournament in Germany. They arrive in Bavaria and first fool around on the field – before they run off the next day. The Sri Lankans spread around Europe, and no one saw them since.
The Israeli-French film Z32 by Avi Mograbi gives a shocking testimony to a soldier's joy of fighting, with subsequent recognition and need for forgiveness. The young man was involved in a massacre, a revenge operation in which unarmed Palestinians were slaughtered. The documentary has musical features, similar to the chorus of a Greek tragedy. Why did the elite soldiers pierce the already dead body? The film plays out in the sign of remorse and the testimony is crossed with the director's more artistic-musical mourning exercise.
PA-RA-DA by Marco Pontecorvo, a French-Romanian documentary, should also be mentioned. The director joins a clown and a circus to Bucharest where they meet the street children, the so-called "beoskettari", petty thieves, beggars and prostitutes. This is about children who grow up too early, but their hopes are kept alive through roles in the circus, friendship, solidarity and hope.
Although much of a film festival should be overlooked, the Venice Film Festival is now on a par with Berlin, Cannes and Toronto. This is because the political-ethical and free artistic engagement again has enough space.
