Montreal: uneven, nervous, and topical

The Montreal World Film Festival (Fr. Le Festival des Films du Monde, FFM) is one of the oldest in Canada and the only North American competitive festival accredited by the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (Fr. Federation Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films, FIAPF). It takes place annually in late August – early September in Montreal, the capital of the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec.

This festival owes its existence, in fact, to the will of one person: Serge Lozick, now 84, one extremely arbitrary and exotic Yugoslavia native, a successful businessman and the owner of a huge horse rancho. He created the FFM in 1977, and he regularly endangers it by quarreling with the government or with the sponsors. The latter once even tried to launch an alternative festival, unsuccessfully. Recently Lozick has refused to reveal his accounts at the request of the regional government, losing the funding again, but becoming the hero of ordinary citizens. This year, too, was not devoid of trouble: a strike of projectionists, who had not been paid what they were promised, was narrowly avoided. At the same time Lozick knows everyone in the cinema world: for example, in 1970s he was able to invite the legendary French film-maker Jean-Luc Godard to Montreal for lectures – in short, his authority is huge, and among other things that fact was demonstrated at the closing ceremony, when the festival’s director came on stage after the awards had been distributed not from the main hall, as the winners did, but from behind a raising curtain, like in a theater.

Certainly, the founder’s policy on supporting original and non-commercial cinema is maintained strictly. This year’s main event (the World Competition) was composed of 25 feature-length films with extremely wide geography of participants, from China to Finland and from Brazil to Russia. At the same time there were no movie celebrities, no big names, neither among the directors nor the actors. In fairness it should be noted that North America as a whole has not yet developed a festival infrastructure such as it is in Europe. The Famous Toronto Forum, while boasting enough celebrities, in fact is a huge film market without any competition or a jury; the US and Canada have nothing equal to the influential in terms of prizes Cannes, Berlin or Venice festivals – but the local film industry is also different.

On its part, the FFM resembles a typical European festival. Noticeable is the organizers’ wish to maintain a cinematographic dialog between different countries, to build bridges between distant cultures. There is yet another familiar component of the participants’ selection policy – the focus on acute social or even political movies.

Thus the Bulgarian The Petrov File (director Georgi Balabanov, the prize for the Best Director) and Russian The Soul of a Spy (director Vladimir Bortko) are related to intelligence work in the countries emerging from communist regimes. But if The Petrov File is at least sometimes satisfactory in regard of showing the end of an era of dictatorship and the difficulties that simple townsfolk experience during the transitional period, The Soul of a Spy was a real artistic disaster – primarily because of Bortko’s desire to “humanize” the workers of today’s FSB. The Soul of a Spy is bad at everything: the actors, the direction, the dialogs, the screenplay; and that is difficult to reconcile with the fact that the author of this trash had previously made the famous Heart of a Dog. However, the decline in talent is often accompanied by an increase in pettiness and stupidity within a particular director, writer or musician; The Soul of a Spy only confirms that.

The World War Two is another burning topic in today’s Russia, inflamed in the militaristic and chauvinistic hysteria. The film On the Road to Berlin by Sergei Popov is an interesting attempt to look at the hackneyed theme from another angle: the main characters are two Soviet soldiers who unwittingly find themselves in the positions of the security guard and the detained one. Despite all his efforts, Popov made a third-rate front-line movie, permeated with all the relevant rubber stamps: the Germans are either wild animals or target practice; a Kazakh and a Russian are in the battlefield, while a Ukrainian is in the kitchen; our cause is righteous; the Soviets authorities are strict, but fair, etc. The battle scenes and scenery are subpar, but it is not so particularly surprising – after all, the movie was not made for the sake of art, but for propaganda; the interesting question is when at least the directors in Russia will finally stop playing war? It’s not even funny anymore.

To some extent a response to On the Road to Berlin was a German-Polish production, the Summer Solstice (director Michal Rogalski, the prize for the Best Script). It is the story of two young men in the occupied Poland of the summer 1943. On the one side is a Pole – a locomotive driver, on the other – a 17-year-old German occupier. Both of them find themselves in a situation of a severe and inevitable moral choice. The director shows no particular sympathy towards the Germans, to the Russian partisans, and to the particular selfish Poles. In general, the Summer Solstice is a story of the existential choice – without reference to a specific historical context.

The topic of Nazism, in modern terms, is explored by the John Hron (Sweden), filmed following the real events. The Director Jon Pettersson shows rampant neo-Nazi gangs that terrorized Sweden in the 1990s, and the brave guy named John Hron, who remained alone in his opposition against them – and how it resulted in a tragedy. Unfortunately, good intentions here were not supported by a sufficient level of directing.

The same can be said about the majority of the competition participants. One after another films by seemingly well-known and serious cinema makers turned out as disappointments. More or less satisfactorily was The Girl King, a co-production of Germany, Canada, Finland, and Sweden, directed by 60-year-old Mika Kaurismaki – a brother of the cult Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki – however, this historical drama about the legendary Christina, Swedish queen of the 17th century (Malin Buska was awarded the Best Actress prize in the end), was clearly intended for a commercial release, and thus not very fitting within the festival format. A pleasant exception was the Secret (directed by Selim Evci, Turkey)       – an easy-going but skillfully made movie, a family drama precise in the implementation. The film could have assumed the title of the undisputed leader of the festival, but lost to another movie – interestingly, also a Turkish one, more on which later.

I followed the events being in a not too familiar role – as a member of the jury, specifically, the jury of FIPRESCI (the International Federation of Film Critics). I was the first Ukrainian is this role in the entire festival’s history.

Our team included six people, everyone from different countries: Spain, Poland, Italy, and Canada, presided by Andres Nazarala from Chile, a man extremely intelligent and paternally caring. Our work was to patiently watch all the competition movies to its end regardless of their quality, and then to discuss them. As FIPRESCI prize was also provided for the competition debut, we were divided into two groups. The discussions were not particularly lengthy, given the fact that we have identified the favorite almost unanimously, with only a slight opposition – once we had watched The Visitor (Misafir) by Turkish director Mehmet Eryilmaz.

The Visitor can boast not only an extremely strong and cohesive cast, but also the director’s close attention to visual detail (a feature lacking in other contestants). Eryilmaz is generous with his screen time when stopping the camera at a particular rug on the wall during a tense conversation; this “interjection” is woven into the fabric of the film closely and assertively, displaying the relationships between the characters as good as any of the most verbose dialogs. The director has built a true cinematic poem from the everyday life of a poor and unfriendly family; his reward is certainly deserved.

After all, apart from our prize The Visitor has also won the second most significant award of the festival, the Special Grand Jury Award. The first award was given to a clearly weaker Mad Love by Philippe Ramos, France, but it cannot shadow the highlights of the Turkish movie.

As cliche as it may sound, but the jury has really no space for ambitions; a true critic always remembers their place – in the service staff of the art. The work helps the jury to do what we, critics, do anyway – supporting good movies. This time the support manifested not only in reviews, but in a certain amount of power, given by the virtue of the festival jury. And I am happy to have received the opportunity.

Finally, I will repeat what has already been said before: my work in the FIPRESCI Jury at the Montreal World Film Festival I dedicate to the prisoners of conscience, Ukrainians Oleh Sentsov and Oleksandr Kolchenko, unjustly convicted by the Putin’s regime.