Invitation to Film Criticism Panel – Festival Notes, no. 4

“Film criticism in crisis” seems to be a common and widespread phrase when the contemporary state of writing about cinema is discussed at festivals, panels, film schools and workshops all around the world. IndieLisboa joins this debate tomorrow (Saturday, 17:30, Cinema São Jorge) with an international panel of established film writers attending the festival.

A word or two on my colleague panelists: Vladan Petkovic comes from Serbia, contributes to several newspapers and magazines in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Screen International and Cineuropa.org webpage, works as a programmer and has as well some experience in producing. Demetrious Matheou is a British critic (Guardian, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Sight and Sound film magazine) and is currently writing a book on contemporary South American cinema. Both Vladan and Demetrious are members of IndieLisboa’s FIPRESCI jury this year. Gabriel Klinger was born in Brazil but he lives and works in Chicago, as a film critic, teacher and curator. He has written for over twenty journals including De Filmkrant in Holland, Ekran in Slovenia, indieWIRE, Letras de cine in Spain, Undercurrent (FIPRESCI’s online journal). Portugal will be represented by André Dias, a PhD researcher (ambiguity in modern cinema, cinephilia and contemporary philosophy) programmer and author of the Portuguese-language blog on cinema and contemporary culture Ainda não começámos a pensar (‘We have yet to start thinking’).

Film criticism is an umbrella expression covering various forms and styles of writing about film: from capsule write-ups to theory pieces, essays, reviews, blogs … to name only a few of most common ‘genres’. The quartet of critics presented above is joining the IndieLisboa panel from different backgrounds and traditions of film criticism (daily newspapers, film magazines, trades, online film communities) and – what’s even more interesting – from different cultures with different cinema environments. Take this entry as an invitation to join the discussion! I get the impression this will be quite a lively event – as usually happens when critics get together at festivals – and I mean that in a productive way. Festivals have influenced the face of modern cinephilia and film criticism to a similar extent as the internet and digital technologies have done. International friendships and professional connections give you access to basically every title you want to see (albeit mostly on your home computer)… not to mention the exchange of ideas and proposals, and discoveries of great (new or old) filmmakers you couldn’t have heard of any other way – because their work had, for whatever reason, never crossed the borders of it’s country. Festivals also create communities, even if only for a week or for a couple of days. A feeling to be surrounded by a group of people with similar interests and passions, a feeling of belonging – which is an especially precious and rare state of mind in the current climate.

Back to tomorrow and to our topics of conversation: Do people still read film criticism? Have critics lost their authority? How to draw a line between professional film criticism and the outburst of opinions expressed about films and filmmakers to be found on the internet? When and how does online film criticism matter? What are its strengths in comparison to print? What new possibilities does it open in terms of understanding cinema and exploring film culture?

The role of the film critic, as we used to know it, is in the process of being utterly and irreversibly changed. It seems time to redefine it and connect it to modern times.

We hope to see you there – everyone is welcome: just to listen, or also to participate!

Festival Notes Go Trivial, no. 3

The festival is sliding into it’s second half, film reels are rolling, filmmakers are presenting their work to audiences, festival guests are flying in and out and everyone seems to be enjoying their stay at IndieLisboa. It’s time to share some festival trivia, I guess.

Days begin with breakfast at our Florida hotel, which has rooms in tribute to films, filmmakers, and even genres, and it’s always amusing to discover who is sleeping with Jimmy Stewart, Audrey Hepburn, or King Kong. My room is David Lynch, and I’m still convinced that I got the best one in the whole hotel. No bizarre dreams so far, but the bathroom door has a habit to open in the middle of the night, which got me a bit scared at first. As long as I don’t go buffalo hunting I should be all right.

Festival breakfasts are a great opportunity to catch up on recommendations of films one shouldn’t miss in the upcoming days, to meet new cinema friends through your old cinema friends, and to get a chance for less formal conversations with filmmakers. The presence (or non-presence) of festival guests at breakfast also reveals the casualties left behind after late-night parties at Cabaret Maxime. There is a nice old piano in the middle of the hotel restaurant and yesterday morning we were honored by a short musical intervention by Siegfried, director or Kinogamma (screens again on 29th and is a current number 1 film in audience vote) – who is throwing a concert tonight at Maxime that you might not want to miss. Sig is an established musician and had just recently released a new album called Free Cinematic Sessions, together with his trio and four guest musicians (on of them being Eric Truffaz).

Yesterday I met up with Luís Urbano from O Som e a Fúria (translates into ‘The Sound and The Fury’) production company which unites a group of interesting Portuguese independent filmmakers and had been brought to international spotlight with the success of Our Beloved Month of August, a film by Miguel Gomes. I met Luis and Miguel at Viennale, a splendid film festival notorious for its focus on cutting edge cinema and great retrospective programmes, where we were able to see the complete work of Miguel Gomes last year. I was blown away by Our Beloved Month of August and went to watch it twice. I don’t know if Portuguese film/culture politicians are aware that two of the most interesting filmmakers of contemporary cinema are Portuguese (Pedro Costa is the other director I have in mind), but I hope they will soon be informed about it and will start supporting their work and talent on a more regular basis.

What was discussed during the meeting with Luis and more on O Som e a Furia will follow in one of the next blog entries, in this one I should report that I got kidnapped afterwards and taken on a very nice tour around Lisbon. Miguel Gomes and Lisa Persson had borrowed a car from Miguel’s kind aunt, packed Gastón Solnicki (go and check out his documentary Süden), his girlfriend Maite and myself on the back seats and brought us to Alfama and to Belém. I can still feel Pastéis melting in my mouth.

Gabe Klinger, a friend and an excellent writer on film from the United States, says that all foreign visitors at the festival should make the journey to the higher neighborhood (Bairro Alto) in order to sit under the sprawling tree in Parque Principe Real. The tree is a recurring character in João César Monteiro’s films, and is especially prominent in his last work, Vai-e-vem (2003), as reflected in his eye in the final shot he ever directed. It’s a good place to ponder the festival films. Gabe promised to take me there.

Wednesday closed with the national premiere of Eccentricities of a Blonde-haired Girl, a film by Manoel de Oliveira. The respected director, as well all know, enters his 100th year of life, and this event was for sure one of the highlights of the festival. Jumping onto and off of the stage, I couldn’t understand a word he said but it was a moving to see he still possesses such youthful grace.

Between working, wanting and waiting — Festival Notes, no. 2

What does it take to make a film? Producers say it is the money. Critics are convinced it’s all about having a good idea and the right skills and sensibility to translate it into images. Werner Herzog (a retrospective of his work is showing at IndieLisboa this year, which compelled me to read the ‘Herzog on Herzog’ book of interviews before I slept) insists, “Organization and commitment are the only things that start and finish films, not money”. If you trust Godard, you might only need a girl and a gun.

The International Competition section of IndieLisboa presents first and second features, in other words the work of “young filmmakers”. “Young”, here, is meant in relation to cinema. How young or how old they are, biologically speaking, is another question. In Slovenia, the country I come from, it is quite common that fresh film school graduates need to wait a long, long time before they can make their first feature-length film. Some wait for so long that they never make it. One should know there are not more than three filmmakers graduating from the academy each year and that – in normal circumstances – the annual production output of films in Slovenia is around five features. From what I’ve read in the Portuguese colleagues, the number of feature films produced here in Portugal is more or less the same, however the number of graduating film students per year is significantly higher. These statistics (approximately 5 features a year) only cover “national” film projects, films funded by government subsidies and money sourced from “national” film bodies. Yet it somehow happens, both in Portugal and Slovenia as well as many other European countries, that those “national” productions are more or less the only films being made. National budgets obviously need to be distributed among a number of filmmakers of different profiles and ages wanting and waiting to make their films. Additionally, application forms are usually put together in a way that they prioritize more experienced and established directors, which is understandable since supporting their work, at least on appearance, involves less risk. Where does this leave the young, starting filmmakers?

It should leave them with Herzog’s advice about organization and commitment, with creativity and urge to make films, searching for alternative ways of funding in order to brings their ideas to the big screen. Does it sound over-simplified and patronizing, since we all know that making films requires more than girls and guns and ideas, but (almost always) a significant amount of money? We’ve seen too many brilliant filmmakers finding ways to replace unreachable, if not non-existent state funds to believe that alternatives are not possible.

Interestingly enough, the majority of such alternative examples come from cinema outside of Europe. Think of the Argentinean new wave, the first films of Pablo Trapero, Lucretia Martel, Lisandro Alonso and many of their contemporaries. Think of the many prolific filmmakers from Southest Asia (the Philippines and Malaysia especially). Contemporary film history is, to a great extent, being written by filmmakers who come from Asia, Latin America, and even Africa. European cinema introduced the system of national subsidies in order to fight the threat posed by the American film industry, but slowly the negative aspect of this decision is beginning to show. It used to be said that Hollywood had money, while European cinema had soul, but it seems the soul of cinema is finding new homes. While European filmmakers…wait.

A discussion was sparked among jurors here at IndieLisboa, about filmmakers from Latin America and Southeast Asia vis a vis filmmakers from Europe and how active and inventive the former are in producing their (low-budget, shot in digital yet highly interesting and internationally successful) films. Financing their films with grants and co-productions coming from ‘global funds’ (the Hubert Bals Fund, Fond Sud, World Cinema Fund and Open Doors, to name a few), and festivals awards (as well as project markets), has enabled them a certain continuity in production we don’t often see among the younger generations of European filmmakers. I think it’s important to acknowledge that ‘global funds’ are just another funding system that only a select few are able to avail of – which makes me wonder if the difference between the European system of subsides and the “alternative” system of grants, awards and co-production funds are really as different as it seems to appear on the first sight. One might also say that grants, awards and co-production funds aimed at non-European filmmakers are actually initiated by European countries (more precisely, by former colonizers, but that is another topic…) and backed by European money. And, last but not least, one might add that European filmmakers are, by default, excluded from the possibly of receiving these grants (because they have their own national funds) which make a decent living and enable creative freedom for filmmakers from Asian and Latin American countries.

However, there is another obvious and important difference one seems to notice when comparing the European cinema landscape with filmmaking from, let’s say, Southeast Asia: support, collaborations and friendships among the filmmakers. In Malaysia, for example, a group of directors willingly to invest their own award money into productions of their colleagues – on the premise that they are encouraging and establishing a healthy cinema environment in which the filmmakers take turns making films, often producing and doing technical work on each others projects. Do you see something like that happening in Europe?

Could it be – this is just a proposition – that this solidarity comes from the fact that there are limited to no national subsides to fight for and therefore be jealous about (or: either the possibility of progressive work receiving it is almost none or support is only provided when the finished films are accepted into major festivals)? In Slovenia filmmakers and producers hate each other, many times without reason save for the fact that they are bitter competitors lobbying under the table of Slovenian Film Fund.

Should filmmakers live on air, make films with hardly existing budgets, surviving on the help of their friends, who often do not get paid for their contributions? Certainly not. It is only fair that there are funds and grants and national subsidies which may help them to produce their film, and that they are compensated for their work. But it is, in a way, still difficult to understand the constant complaints of (especially) young European filmmakers about the impossibility of gaining sufficient finances for their first feature project… and sad to see so few really interesting European young filmmaking.

Why IndieLisboa? — Festival Notes, no. 1

My plane landed in Lisbon Friday night, just in time to catch the famous opening party at Lux club. I remember Lux from last year, when I first attended IndieLisboa as a member of the FIPRESCI jury, and spent my first few hours there, meeting the festival team, my colleague jurors and a number of other foreign festival guests on the roof of the club building, overlooking the water and the city of Lisbon. I made a good friend that night, her name is Sonya, she’s a fairy who lives in Azores and comes to Lisbon every year to work at the festival, being one of the ninety film-loving volunteers who help in organizing it. Memories of IndieLisboa 2008 were filling my head while riding a van with Catharina, the festival driver, who came to pick me up from the airport. We chatted about our background and work we do outside of the festival: she is into photography and is thinking to pursue film in the future, while I had just recently quit editing the film magazine Ekran (a 47-year old Slovenian bi-monthly, devoted to auteur and independent world cinema), somehow moved to Manila and now work as an freelance film writer/journalist (I’ve never considered myself a critic in the commonly understood sense of the term) and film programmer.

It was a difficult decision to make, but as a serious film person (read: exhausted from the long overseas flight) I asked Catharina to bring me to the hotel instead of to the party, in order to recuperate and get ready for the intense festival week ahead. Catching up on the opening party and everything else I’ve missed took place next day at lunch in Magnolia, the ‘festival’ restaurant in the Londres Cinema building, where I met Raymond Walravens, Managing Director and Curator of Amsterdam’s arthouse cinema Rialto, and Demetrious Matheou, UK film critic (Guardian, Observer, Sight&Sound) and writer. It’s Demetrious’ first time at IndieLisboa (he is on the FIPRESCI Jury) while it’s Raymond second; he was here previously to see films he was considering to show in his cinema in Netherlands. This year he’s in main jury for the International Competition, and again, or should I say like always, is looking for films to share with Amsterdam audiences.

We talked about the position of IndieLisboa among other European film festivals. In only six years the festival has build a reputation as a highly relevant national and international film event. While its national role is to select and introduce the most interesting independent world cinema to the Lisbon public, its international esteem comes from the focus the festival has put on creating a dialogue between the films and the audience. There is a dangerous trend in the film field in the last several years (nearing a decade now), which is to turn film festivals into film markets and business platforms, taking away space and energy for discussion of cinema – it’s all about investing, buying, selling, consulting, interfering with the form and content of films before the production even begins … IndieLisboa began and remains about film, about cinema, which is evident as soon as one opens the festival catalogue and studies the program; carefully composed and selected through meticulous film viewing, following almost everything that was made and shown internationally in the past film year.

Critics and film professionals who travel often will tell you how the majority of European festivals show the same titles («the usual suspects», you might call them). This is a sad fact in times of an increasing global cinema: the possibility of being exposed to a greater amount and diversity of cinema has increased; yet often we still choose to show the same select titles. In many cases selections are not done on the basis of rigorous viewing by the selection committee, but by programmers (or festival directors) who prefer to make obvious and safe selections by simply imitating the programs of other well established festivals – eschewing the work viewing piles and piles of (often times average) films in order to find for themselves fresh, daring, innovative – even if not always completely flawless – cinema, in favor of the easy and popular fixes.

This isn’t the case with IndieLisboa.

I’ve been to several festivals over the past twelve months and yet still have a lot of fresh cinema to catch up with here in Lisbon; for a foreign journalist or programmer, this is as good a reason as any to attend a festival. Besides screenings of contemporary works, there are also two retrospective programs (Werner Herzog and Jacques Nolot in 2009), special sections (like IndieMusic and IndieJunior) as well as additional festival activities (IndieTalks, Lisbon Screenings); making certain there is always something to do or see.

IndieLisboa is a festival that is not afraid to stake its claim and make its own statements about what contemporary cinema is. They do not forgo the desires of their audience – they bring to the country a selection of “the usual suspects” the local audience may want to see – but balance it with their own vision of modern and challenging cinema. It is a festival that believes in the curiosity, openness and sensibility of the audience that comes to watch films in the festival, just as much as the audience trusts and believes in the cinema knowledge of the organizers. It is a festival about synergy, reciprocity, interaction and dialogue.

Which brings me to another special and rather rare characteristic of IndieLisboa among international film festivals: it’s atmosphere. This is a festival where the filmmakers who come to present their work are more at ease, where anyone (an attending professional or member of the audience) can approach and speak to them, not only during their Q&A sessions but after screenings as well, pulling their sleeves outside of the cinema to have a more private conversation with them. The same filmmakers who are too busy and all about business in Cannes, Venice or Berlin, become very accessible in Lisbon. This is no accident, it’s an atmosphere cultivated by the organizers year after year.