It's that time of year again. For the past few months, we've been knee-deep in film festivals all over the Bay area. There are a few more to go, but the season reaches its official peak this week with the very best of the lot.
The Second Annual Tampa International Film Festival takes place from April 2 through April 10, and for lovers of world cinema it doesn't get any better than this.
There are local film festivals with better name recognition and groovier parties — but in terms of sheer quality of the films being presented, nothing touches The Tampa International Film Festival. In a nutshell, TIFF is a class act, and by far the most significant film event ever seen around these parts.
Over the course of TIFF's nine days at Madstone Theaters, some 20 acclaimed films from around the world will be screened, all handpicked from major international film festivals. Most of these films will be making their Florida and even Southeast U.S. premieres, and several of the filmmakers are expected to be on hand. Let me stress that many of these films won't ever appear on video or DVD, so the TIFF screenings will probably be your one and only chance to see them. Once they're gone, they're gone.
The festival bills itself as "cinema for a new world," and this year's challenging lineup certainly lives up to that description. Things kick off at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 2, with the Florida premiere of Luck, director Peter Wellington's amusingly eccentric account of obsessive love, set against the passions of the Canadian-Soviet hockey rivalry of the early '70s. Sarah Polley stars in this smartly written comedy, the '70s fashions are to die for, and a couple of former Smashing Pumpkins supplied the soundtrack. Various folks associated with the film are expected to appear at the opening night screening but were unconfirmed at press time.
Things really start getting interesting with the 9 p.m. screening of Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold. Uncompromising, emotionally and artistically electrifying, and just the sort of film on which TIFF has built a reputation, Panahi's latest offering eschews the children's world of his previous White Balloon for the heartbreakingly adult tragedy of an ordinary man. The film takes a universal tale — that of a lower-class man with no power and no prospects, caught in a relentless downward spiral — and infuses it with a distinctly Iranian perspective. The result is a richly textured, artifice-free slice of life from a world most of us have never seen.
There's a nicely orchestrated triple bill of films slated for Saturday, April 3. First up, at 5 p.m., is The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (repeating April 8 at 9:15), Canadian director Anne Marie Fleming's wonderfully entertaining investigation into the life of her magician-acrobat great-grandfather. The film is also something of a crash course in the history of the early 20th century, with Fleming following her once-famous, now-forgotten ancestor as he globetrots from China to Europe to America. Long Tack Sam is filled with clever and imaginative touches, as well as stories-within-stories about a fascinating and ultimately unknowable man once revered by the likes of Orson Welles.
At 7 p.m. the festival changes gears with A La Petite Semaine, an engaging French crime movie that defies all expectations. Dynamic, handheld camerawork and a rigorous attention to the smallest details transform the film into less of a heist movie and more of a character study about aging ex-cons and petty criminals going nowhere fast. Director Sam Karmann will be on hand for the Florida premiere of his film.
Then, at 9:15, there's another one of those films you won't see anywhere else but at this festival. If you crossed Jim Jarmusch and Andrei Tarkovsky you might wind up with something a little like Distant ("Uzak"), but this Turkish film is ultimately its own creature, a one-of-a-kind experience. The winner of several awards at Cannes (including the coveted Grand Jury Prize), Distant fuses the fine line between comedy (albeit of the drollest sort) and pathos in its nearly wordless account of an Istanbul photographer being driven to distraction by his country bumpkin cousin. Director N.B. Ceylan uses gorgeously composed, mostly static images, long, leisurely takes and muted, sometimes awkward performances to create a cinematic poem.
The program on Sunday, April 4, is a bit more conventional. It begins at 4:30 with the Austrian production Donau, a beautifully produced but somewhat overarching allegory about a ship of fools making its final voyage down the Danube River. The boat travels from Vienna to the Black Sea, crossing borders and carrying with it an assortment of damaged souls looking to escape from all manner of personal problems. Births, deaths and weddings take place along the way, characters appear and vanish, and relationships flourish and wither, as the boat moves through a microcosm of modern Europe.
Next up, at 7 p.m. is Hanele (repeating April 8 at 5 p.m.), the new film from Czech director Karel Kachyna, whose The Cow screened at last year's TIFF. This is a more traditional sort of film from Kachyna, a romantic fable about a young Jewish woman who leaves the simple life of her remote Ukranian village for the complications of the big city. The film toys with too many subplots, but is most effective in its poetic early sequences depicting life in an early 20th-century Jewish shtetl. When Hanele wanders into romantic and political territory, the film bogs down.
Sunday's program concludes with the 9 p.m. screening of Huo Jianqi's sweetly nostalgic Postmen in the Mountains. This gorgeously filmed, award-winning Chinese film tells of a young man attempting to follow in his father's footsteps as the lone postman in a remote, mountainous area near Hunan. The movie's a little too eager to tweak our emotions, and the inevitable father-son bonding occasionally cloys, but the episodic structure feels both honest and warming, and it all unfolds in a pleasant, dreamy way.
The schedule for Monday, April 5, begins with a 4:30 matinee of The Survivors ("Los Sobrevivientes"), one of the very few films in this year's festival I didn't get a chance to preview. On the other hand, I'm more than prepared to recommend it solely on the basis of its director — the legendary Cuban filmmaker Tomás Guitiérrez Alea — and due to the fact the film is dedicated to Luis Bunuel, whose Exterminating Angel was the inspiration for Alea's film. The Survivors was never released commercially in the United States and, like Bunuel's film, it is reportedly the darkest of dark comedies.
There's another pitch-black comedy in store at 7 p.m.: Small Town ("Mestecko"), which also happens to be one of my favorite films of the festival. Czech director Jan Kraus serves up a wicked satire of the New Capitalism, Eastern European-style, where everyone has a barely legal get-rich-quick scheme, and corruption and bad behavior run rampant. Small Town's humor flows from greed, chaos and a half-droll, half-slapstick nihilism, while most everybody in the movie resembles fat, sweaty potatoes, vodka oozing from every pour. This will be the East Coast premiere of this rude and wonderful film.
The evening concludes with the 9:15 screening of another Cuban film, Life Is to Whistle, a sensual and high-spirited comedy about three very different people living in modern day Havana. The people are pretty, the humor is alternately absurd and earthy, the local color captivating, and the music rocks.
The truly adventurous film buff won't want to miss a minute of the program on Tuesday, April 6, which is probably the festival's single most ambitious evening. At 4:30 p.m. there's Kafka Fragment, a rigorously experimental work by Austrian director Christian Frosch. Moving images mix with black-and-white stills, and creepy Lynchian sound effects abound, as a voice claiming to be the writer Franz Kafka murmurs about a woman with whom he's obsessed. The film occasionally verges on art-overkill, but it's an appropriate appetizer for things to come.
Prepare to be amazed at 7 p.m. with Russian Ark, Alexandr Sokurov's fantastic voyage through several hundred years of Russian history. The film was shot in the Hermitage Museum in a single, fluid, uncut take, in real time and with a cast of what seems like thousands. I won't even attempt to say more. Go and see this film.
If your brain and eyes are still able to absorb anything else, do your very best to stick around for the 9 p.m. screening of Werkmeister Harmonies, a four-years-in-the-making masterpiece by the great Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. Tarr's latest film chronicles the collective psychosis of an entire population when a stuffed whale exhibit comes to town. Like Tarr's seven-hour Santantango, which was presented at last year's festival, the film is both mystical and apocalyptic, as bleak as it is beautiful, and as stunning a piece of filmmaking as you will ever see.
Wednesday, April 7, begins with a repeat screening of Postmen in the Mountains at 5 p.m., followed by another of the festival's highlights: Marooned in Iraq, from Bahman Ghobadi, the Iranian director of A Time for Drunken Horses. Festival director Rob Tregenza calls this "the greatest Kurdish road movie of all time," and I'd have to agree. This Iranian gem takes place just after the first Gulf War, and follows a Kurdish singer and his two sons as they travel across a ravaged, post-war Iraq in search of the family's vanished matriarch. The film is wise, funny, powerful, and it's full of astonishing music, exquisite landscapes and surreal sequences set in refugee camps, mass gravesites and circus-like weddings. This is another must-see.
The festival signs off for the night with a 9 p.m. screening of Jean-Luc Godard's cerebral anti-lullaby Helas Pour Moi ("Woe is Me"). Part murder mystery, part theological inquiry, part cosmic romance and all Godard, Helas Pour Moi stars Gerard Depardieu as a man who may just be sharing a body with God. "Making sentences is easy," says one of the film's characters, adding, "It's the unmaking of them that's troubling" — and Godard, the great un-maker of sentences, also composes some of the most eloquent and profound ones around. The first Godard film to be theatrically distributed in America in a decade, Helas Pour Moi is a densely constructed treat, and a veritable ode to life, death, love, beauty, God, art and the world of ideas.
There's more too. The festival has an entire weekend of great films to go, including two of the best films of the entire festival — Takeshi Kitano's Dolls and the delightful Hungarian oddity Hukkle — but we'll save that for next week's column. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and check out some of these remarkable movies. The world is waiting.
Single admission tickets to films are $7, $5 for students and seniors. Festival passes for 10 admissions are available for $50 and a Gold Pass to all screenings and the opening night party is available for $150.00. Madstone Theaters, Old Hyde Park Village, 1609 W. Swann Ave. Tampa (813-258-4646). For more information, visit the festival website at http://tampafilmfest.com or call 253-3333, ext. 3425.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2004.