MAS Y MAS #3 - Black Sea (en)

MÁS y MÁS More young talent, more European cinema in Cannes

#3

Thursday 24 May 2007

Black Sea

California Dreamin’ Orhan Pamuk 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days English version www.nisimasa.com

Editorial L

ast year, we devoted a special edition of Nizimazine to Romania, predicting a noticeable renewal amongst the country’s cineastes. The Caméra d’Or awarded to Corneliu Porumboiu for 12:08 East of Bucharest confirmed our intuition. The selection this year of two Romanian films for the Sélection Officielle (one debut and one second feature films) affirms that this is not just a passing trend.

Of course all is not rosy around the Carpathian Mountains. The recent problems of Cristiu Puiu, the director of The Death of Mister Lazarescu who saw his new project stalled by the Centre of Romanian Cinema, reveal the multiple

hurdles of a post-communist society.

Almost twenty years after the fall of the Wall, the same problems remain: inter-generational conf lict, the unreformable bureaucratic system, the lack of financial support, etc. Justifiably, young directors both use and transcend these subjects, as for example the talented Bulgarian documentary filmmaker Andrey Paounov with The Mosquito Problem. Here we witness, perhaps more than elsewhere, of a pressing need to take up one’s camera in order to ‘tell the world’. New evidence that the two recent entrants to the European Union are not just cinematographic rearguards, destined only as a location for

the outsourcing of film shootings.

If we add to this the multi-genre dynamism of Turkish cinema and its Diaspora (the rebel child of Hamburg, Fatih Akin, is finally in competition at Cannes; winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Orhan Pamuk has been invited to be on the jury; astute cineaste Semih Kaplanoglu is presenting the first part of his trilogy at the Quinzaine), we have the outlines of an unusual region. What if, against all expectations, and after China, South Korea or Argentina, the Black Sea was taking shape as a vibrant place on the cinematographic world atlas?

Photo Lasse Lecklin

Matthieu Darras

A practice for the 80th anniversary poster...

Photo of the day

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4 luni, 3 saptamini si 2 zile 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Cristian Mungiu, Romania, Official Competition

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t could have been an innocuous, detailed account.

Four months, three weeks and two days. Except that the title of Cristian Mungiu’s film hides an unrelenting countdown. 4, 3, 2: one declared death sentence. At this stage of a pregnancy, abortion is entirely illegal. Practised in spite of everything, the act then becomes clandestine. Doubly traumatising.

Such is the starting point of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

Gabita, a young student living in university halls, prepares herself for an illegal abortion within the walls of a city-centre hotel room.

From the early morning preparations until the middle of the night, her roommate, Otilia, will accompany her throughout this irreversible ordeal, which will leave her too deeply marked.

Humiliated and violated following the blackmail imposed upon them by the ‘angel-maker’, handsomely paid for what is a most rudimentary operation, the two young women must then dispose of the foreign body, “expelled” even from

the bathroom tiling. Unbearable, Otila’s frantic and lonely wandering leads her through the labyrinth of small, dirty streets of a town plunged into the inky black of an endless night, disturbed by barking dogs and the sound of unknown footsteps. Almost hounded, she will finish her blind race at the top of a squalid stairwell, facing the f lap of a narrow rubbish chute. The deed is horrifying. Return to the sizzling neon lights of the hotel. On the ground f loor, the popular music of a finishing marriage ceremony sounds. Between the two friends, only one question remains: was she able to bury it or not? The question is a murmur, the response a last sealed pact between them. Not to be spoken of again. Forget, already. Try to forget. Give birth to a new secret.

An unyielding urban and social tale capturing a harsh reality, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days reveals a form of cinema of urgency, refusing all pathos and dead screen time. We are made to think

of the Dardenne brothers.

In imposing a very raw style, Cristian Mungiu sets himself apart from the tragicomic, a common trait within young Romanian cinema.

Indirectly however, he shares with his compatriots an attraction towards relating stories which belong to their recent communist past.

Although the theme of abortion is not specifically Romanian, it brings to the fore the past of a country traumatised by Ceaucescu’s regime. One of the first laws to be repealed after the fall of the regime was “decree 770”, put into effect in 1966, forbidding abortion for women under the age of 40 who had not already conceived at least four children. The negative consequences of this pro-natalist policy were many: the development of clandestine abortion, the considerable rise in maternal mortality rates, etc. This second feature film from Cristian Mungiu reminds us that the after-effects of what was called by Ceaucescu “the Golden Age of Romania” have not finished healing.

Emilie Padellec

California Dreamin’ ay 1999. A group of American NATO soldiers are transporting top-secret military equipment through Romania, en route to Kosovo. Anticipating an easy mission, Captain Doug Jones tells his troops to “sit back and enjoy the ride”. All does not go to plan though when they find themselves stuck in the small town of Capâlnita, after Doiaru, railway station master and corrupt local overlord, refuses them passage without official customs papers. News of the arrival spreads quickly, and soon the entire population of Capâlnita is in a state of excitement. As the camera flits between different characters, we are introduced to an ambitious town mayor keen to attract business, protesting factory workers desperate to make their voices heard, and local girls simply excited at the prospect of young American soldiers…

Part of the so-called “New Wave” generation of young Romanian directors, Cristian Nemescu has produced an accomplished debut feature - unfortunately also his last, as he was tragically killed in a car accident just a few months after finishing editing. A sadly premature end, to a very promising beginning.

Constantly moving between multiple plot threads, California Dreamin’ is rich in detail and scattered with slightly surreal moments (watch out for a brief but delightfully funny adolescent-lust dream sequence). Exploiting the interactions between the stranded

Photo Marian Hanciarec

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troops and the local community to full comic effect, Nemescu offers us an entertaining, if at times rather exaggeratedly eccentric, view of provincial Romanian life. There is however more than enough drama to prevent the story from falling into simple parody, and the main characters are far from one-dimensional figures, thanks to subtly ambiguous performances from the likes of Armand Assante and wellestablished Romanian actor Razvan Vasilescu. A welcome central focus is also provided by an endearingly awkward love triangle involving Doiaru’s wayward teenage daughter, the US sergeant and the sensitive class geek.

The film expresses a criticism of US foreign policy which is given a historical dimension, through black and white f lashbacks to Doiaru’s traumatic childhood experiences during and just after the second world war, explaining thus his real motivations (as Doiaru tells the Captain, “I wait for the Americans to come…to save us from the Germans, the Russians, Ceaucescu. It’s funny that you come now”). The most clichéd of narrative devices this may be, fortunately here the result is neither too heavy-handed nor overly simplistic. As the different plotlines collide in a dizzying and violent final climax - involving, amongst other things, a blackout, a bomb explosion, an orgy and an angry mob - nobody emerges as moral victor.

Judy Lister

Cristian Nemescu, Romania, Un Certain Regard

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The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories Andrey Paounov, Bulgaria, International Critics’ Week

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oung Bulgarian director Andrey Paounov seems to have a weakness for insects. Another peccadillo of his stories. If Giorgi and the Butterflies captured the foolish dreams of the director of a male psychiatric wing, his second documentary, The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories, explores the tragic-comic sanitary crisis of Belene, a township of some 9000 souls along the banks the Danube. In reality, even if the mosquitos constantly occupy the screen - although they are cunningly invisible other more important threats hang over the town. Past or future, totalitarian or nuclear, they leave the odour of suffering and the opacity of the heavy clouds of insecticide in the air.

How to approach the mosquito problem infesting Belene, and eventually ‘liquidate’ it? Falsely innocuous, this is the recurrent question which Andrey Paounov poses to his subjects.

One after the other, facing the camera, almost each one of them responds, sometimes with weapons - a f ly swatter or the less classic vacuum cleaner

and hunting rif le (!) - in hand. From the hunters at the Punata tavern to the cheerleaders, from Boyko, the photographer-historian of the town, to the pianist-composer Todor, via the only Cuban survivor amongst the communist ex-workers of an abandoned nuclear centre: Fernando Diaz or even Ivan and Petar, the two fishermen and ‘beckettian’ companions, everyone has their own little turn or anecdote.

The central question of the mosquitoes is however just a pretext. Little by little, Andrey succeeds in uncovering the ‘real’ problems of Belene. Even if the “zanzare” are a veritable plague,

the traumatisms left by the communist era are revealed as the true local gangrene, of which the meaningful silences are a persisting symptom. The island of Persin still bears the undeniable scar: the old communist concentration camp, which was in operation between 1949 and 1959. A black hole in the middle of a swamp. Even if the horror has disappeared, there are still the vipers which hiss there. Deceased in October 2005, Julia Ruzhgeva was a guard in the camp. During her trial for multiple pre-meditated murders, from which Andrey Paounov borrows a few minutes of unbearable archive footage, she denied everything, insisting she had done nothing. To not remember. In the opening sequence of The Mosquito Problem… her own daughter meditates by the still nameless grave of a mother who was perhaps a “monster”. In the epilogue, her tears are effaced by the innocence of children’s laughter in Belene. The final dotted line of an overwhelmingly beautiful film.

Short: Rabbit troubles

Emilie Padellec

Mitovski and K alev, Bulgaria, International Critics’ Week

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ave you already had problems with rabbits, save from gnawing at roots in your garden? No?! Pay careful attention, a sweet pink and white rabbit can hide something ferocious. An entry on the subject matter of a car advert, this a film in which the intimacy between two lovers transforms into brutality. With a scenic mountain route for backdrop, the short film Rabbit Troubles plays subtly with codes from different genres.

Masterfully, it deroutes the spectator by making a plunge into the absurd.

Directors Mitovski and Kalev stage scenes that at once amuse them and teeter into another reality, a different priority. Rabbit Troubles invents little by little a new leitmotif of cinema - the gnawing destroyer! In a seemingly human world that which dominates is not what one believes. Violent subversions of expectations are coupled with violent

situations. The absurdity of this plot is fed by black humour - more to the point pink and white with pointy ears – or perhaps it is the humour that creates the absurdity. We smile at the image of a sweet and tender stuffed toy rabbit.

This grin also seems to be that of the two Bulgarian directors, who frankly are amusing themselves in the creation of this rather disturbing script!

Joanna Gallardo

Professionnal encounter Juan Eveno,

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post-production manager at

he most technical of the professional encounters during the Prix de la Jeunesse is without a doubt that with Juan Eveno. This pioneer of digital usage started his career in a traditional postproduction chemical laboratory, where camera films are developed. Today many films are shot on digital, meaning without a film negative. In addition, amongst the films made on 35mm, 50% of the post-production is done digitally. This has led to an evolution in the work of not only the chief cameraman but also of the editor.

Ten years ago they moved onto digital whilst they came from an artisanal background, meaning that they edited films by cutting and pasting the negatives by

hand. What is more, some didn’t resist the change, as Juan Eveno affirms. Today, the chief cameraman (or director of photography) is not only involved on set but also in post-production. This changes the working method during shooting. One can film in the knowledge that images can be retouched, and so the colours are not pushed to 100%. The test shots aren’t perfect. The film is under-exposed but this can be corrected thanks to digital technology. According to Juan Eveno, it is hard for the chief cameraman to work in such a way as his instinct is to try to get a good image directly during the shooting.

Instead, he becomes a sort of assistant calibrator, the technician who retouches

Digimage

the film in post-production.

This person improves the colours of an interior (mattpainting), adds more f loors to a building, and many other things too…

Because of the digital evolution and the improvement of technical quality, image definition is ever higher.

Yet the work is no quicker because computers of better performance are always needed. Today a high-definition image takes up 6 megabytes. The very latest image formats can even be up to 40 megabytes. Considering that there are 24 images per second in a film, this could be very heavy technically.

Lighter quality film support (proxi) is thus used in order to make the work easier.

Finally Juan Eveno didn’t

forget to talk about the economic aspects of digital which, according to him, saves money. For example with regards to the lighting, one could shoot a scene in the morning which would then be transformed into an evening scene, without being obliged to create a fake night-time set. There is thus more f lexibility in the working schedule during film shootings.

This meeting was very interesting, giving a positive image of the profession. If digital is the technology of the future, it also allows the conservation of cinematic heritage in restoring films.

Juan Eveno himself reworked the famous classic Intolerance from D.W. Griffith.

Benjamin Zimmermann Joanna Gallardo

Three questions to Are you more in favour of “new” digital cinema or “old” 35mm film?

I am more sensitive to 35mm. It captures more light, more contrast. But above all I am interested in the stories, above all technical aspects.

Photo Lasse Lecklin

Fanny Boulloud

In your opinion, what are the qualities necessary for a young cinéphile ?

I think that one must be open-minded, and know how to exchange ideas and criticise. The most important thing without a doubt is to be ready to travel: to be able to enter into another story, another life. To open oneself to a different world, capable of transporting us and throwing us off course…

Is there anything you would like to say for the special occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Festival ?

I’m going to put on my blonde wig, a cleavage-revealing white dress and I will say: “Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you Mister Cinema!”

Questions

posed by

Yana Dzharova

Fanny, 23, participant of 60 in Cannes, arrives from Strasbourg for wishing happy birthday.

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Portrait

Orhan Pamuk

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One must keep hold of the creative and irresponsible child within oneself ” he repeated in the numerous interviews he had been giving for several months, after the recognition conferred by the Nobel Academy with the award of the Prize for Literature. Orhan Pamuk has cultivated this silent child within in order to invent an imaginary world of astounding richness, shared by readers all over the globe.

Over the course of his novels, the Turkish author, originally from Istanbul,

has painted images of his city and of his country. He has thus become a formidable storyteller of the city of the Bosphorus. His writing, extremely visual, is often structured in the manner of film sequences. We move from one character to another just as a camera would do, following different stories told in parallel. Orhan Pamuk, the lonely boy for whom “daydreaming is an eccentricity particular to himself ”, gives life, in a nostalgic way, to scenes of his town, inheritor of the collapsed empire. In his youth, Orhan wanted to become a painter. His family saw in him a genius. But in the end he preferred to evoke colours through words, through pages. Pamuk works in the same way as a miniaturist painter. “The minature does not show what the eyes see, but what the soul sees”, he says mysteriously. For the author of The New Life, a writer must unveil what nobody can comprehend. From this perspective, words are to literature what colours are

to painting. This approach, so detailed and meticulous, throws light on the fates of his protagonists depending on the mood of the writer, sometimes dark and melancholic, sometimes light and jovial.

As cinematographic as it is, the Nobel Prize-winning work has strangely not yet been adapted for the big screen. In 1991 Pamuk had written a script for the director Omer Kavur, which resulted in the film The Secret Face, his only experience in cinema so far. The situation could soon change. Leading figure of Turkish cinema Nuri Bilge Ceylan (who was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2003 with Uzak), who until now has tended to control the creative process of his films from the writing right up until the editing, has declared his close interest in Pamuk’s work. It is rumoured that the director of Climates could adapt Snow...

Thus, thanks to his sharp eye and the painter hidden within him, this personality and ardent cinéphile has

been invited to judge the 22 films in competition this year. It is a tradition of the festival to welcome literary masters in its jury, Nobel Prize-winning or not. André Maurois was twice juror in the 50s. One could equally cite the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias (another Nobel Prize-winner) in the 70s, the famous Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1982, or the American Toni Morisson in 2005.

This year for the 60th edition of the Cannes Festival, who amongst President Stephen Frears, jurors Maggie Cheung, Toni Collette, Maria De Medeiros, Sarah Polley, Marco Bellocchio, Michel Piccoli, and Abderrahmane Sissako, will have taken the trouble - richly rewarding - to discover the universe of their colleague before their trip to Cannes?

Orhan Pamuk, the genius child, the child who writes, accompanies us in this festival. Let’s hope that the prize list will know how to cultivate a bit of irresponsibility like he does!

Azra Deniz Okyay

MÁS y MÁS is a magazine published by the association NISI MASA with the support of the French Ministry of Health,

Sports and Youth. EDITORIAL STAFF Editor-in-chief Matthieu Darras Secretary of the editorial Joanna Gallardo Artistic director Lasse Lecklin, llecklin@uiah.fi English translations Camilla Buchanan, Judy Lister Contibutors of this issue Yana Dzharova, Judy Lister, Azra Deniz Okyay, Emilie Padellec, Benjamin Zimmermann Print Imprimerie Cyclone, 12 rue des Mimosas, 06400 Cannes. NISI MASA 10 rue de l’Echiquier, 75010, Paris, France + 33 (0)1 53 34 62 78, + 33 (0)6 32 61 70 26 - europe@nisimasa.com - www.nisimasa.com