Kevin Lally - 1 June 2003 - United States - Drowned Out -

Powerfully intimate

Publication: Film Journal International

It’s not yet a mandatory stop on the hectic festival circuit, but the Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF) continues to show promising signs of growth and maturity as it celebrates its sixth year. Admirably, this April event in a lush tourist destination takes the movies seriously, offering an intimate showcase for new directors and socially conscious documentarians, while bringing some of the best new art-house titles to a cinematically undernourished island. Under the guidance of its elegant director, Aideen Ratteray Pryse, and her genial staff, the festival makes an engaging spring haven, even without the extra incentive of that crystalline water and those sparkling pink beaches.

"Our goal is to present a program that represents the world of filmmaking,” says Pryse. “This year, our 72 films were from 17 countries and we would like to expand the geographic reach of our program even more going forward. We want to expose our audiences to different philosophies and styles of filmmaking. We will always have a place in our festival for truly independent works as well as the larger films from the mini-majors. In short, we want our film program to reflect the variety of films being made around the world.”

The festival has separate competition categories for narrative features, documentaries and shorts (what else but the Bermuda Shorts Award), plus a non-competitive World Cinema Showcase. Iceland was the focus of the annual salute to the films of a fellow island, and unstoppable 94-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira was the subject of a four-film tribute.

The Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature went to one of the lighter movies in competition. Josef Fares, a 25-year-old Lebanese director based in Sweden, who won the top prize in Bermuda two years ago for his film Jalla! Jalla!, scored again with his new comedy, Kops. This is a very commercial romp about a police station in a quiet Swedish village which is about to be shut down due to a lack of crime. Desperate to hang onto their jobs, the town’s cops create their own spree of robbery, arson and gang warfare. Fares’ filmmaking is appealingly slick, with some very funny and stylish fantasy sequences, and the buzz around the festival was that Sony plans an English-language remake starring Adam Sandler.

The documentary prize was presented to Patricia Flynn’s Discovering Dominga, the story of an orphaned Guatemalan girl adopted by a family in Iowa, who journeys back to her native country to find the truth behind her family’s murder. I missed the film, but several colleagues recommended it as an exceptionally moving true-life journey.

Bermuda has only four movie theatres, two in the central town of Hamilton, and two at the far ends of the island. A sign of how many high-profile films never even make it to Bermuda, one of the top events of the festival was the premiere of Roman Polanski’s much-acclaimed The Pianist, which easily won the Audience Choice Award. With the support Bermudians show for their festival’s adventurous programming (and the upscale demographic of much of the population), it would seem the opportunity is ripe for an art-house venture on the island.

For their World Cinema Showcase, Pryse and programmer David O’Beirne selected films with both critical heft and audience appeal, including Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief, Andrei Konchalovsky’s House of Fools, Lisa Cholodenko’s L.A. story Laurel Canyon, Patrice Leconte’s Man on the Train, and the irresistible documentaries Only the Strong Survive and Spellbound.

Two of my favorite festival entries were part of the World Showcase. Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro (see review in this issue) might best be described as A Woman Under the Influence in an Italian fishing community, with Valeria Golino (Rain Man) in the Gena Rowlands role. On the island of Lampedusa near western Sicily, free-spirited Gracia—the mother of a teenage girl and two younger boys—chafes under the constraints of her village’s provincial way of life, and her increasingly erratic behavior threatens to turn her into a pariah. Golino is the only professional actor in this hypnotic film, which combines heartbreaking family drama with a vivid documentary-style portrait of a tradition-bound culture.

Iain Dilthey’s The Longing, winner of the Golden Leopard at last year’s Locarno Film Festival, is the deceptively austere tale of Lena, a dutiful, middle-aged German church organist in a stifling marriage to a dour minister, who also tends to his ungrateful, wheelchair-bound sister. When Lena develops an attraction to the local garage mechanic, the consequences go far beyond anything she could have imagined. Like Chantal Akerman’s demanding Jeanne Dielman, The Longing makes a subtle feminist statement about the explosive emotions that can bubble under drab domestic servitude.

The documentary lineup was strong this year. One real eye-opener was Drowned Out, a powerfully intimate report on a national catastrophe still evolving in India. Feisty young British filmmaker Franny Armstrong took her video camera to a small village about to be submerged under the waters of the Narmada River by a major government dam project. The indigenous Adivasi people living there have vowed to drown rather than relocate. Armstrong makes a forceful case that the dam project, intended to bring water to arid parts of the country, is doing more harm than good with its inept, essentially heartless provisions for a primitive farming people whose traditions go back centuries.

One of the most entertaining documentaries in the festival was The Other Final (awarded a Special Jury Mention), a witty account by Dutch filmmaker Johan Kramer of his scheme to stage a soccer showdown between the world’s two lowest-ranked teams, Bhutan and Montserrat. The encounter of two radically different cultures with little in common but their love of the game is a constant delight—and the outcome isn’t necessarily what you’d expect. Even soccer-indifferent American audiences would enjoy this joyful movie.

Opening shortly in New York is The Nazi Officer’s Wife, the incredible story of Edith Hahn, a Jewish woman in Nazi Germany who assumed a new Christian identity and even wed a Nazi officer and bore him a child. The first half of Liz Garbus’ film perhaps needlessly recaps the familiar rise of fascism in Germany, but Hahn’s odyssey is undeniably fascinating, and raises provocative questions about morality and survival.